More orders than carts??

[jefff1821367]

When I run a Products report with metrics output being Unique Visitors, Carts, and Orders, for some products I see that there are more Orders than Carts.

For example, Product X will show 43 Carts and 70 Orders.  It is not possible to order products on my site without initiating a Cart session, so why would I be seeing this?

[ecarpe15 · Accepted solution]

Your Carts is probably set to the scOpen event and maybe configured to fire only when a new cart is created.  Carts wouldn't include customers that open a new cart in visit A then return on Visit B and add items to the existing cart then order.  

Cart Additions maybe a better/closer to orders.  

[Harsh_Kabra]

**All the views given here are my personal and has no relation or doesn't reflect views of my employer.

Hi JF,

Before I answer your question, I would like to explain my understanding of both the metrics in scope, "Carts" and "Orders" and want to make sure that we both come on the same page.

Carts: This metric gives,  "the number of times a new shopping cart was opened or initialized" and we fire "scOpen" event for this only when we create a Shopping Cart for the first time.

Orders: The number of orders placed in the site during the selected time frame (reporting time frame).

Now, if we add Carts and Orders to a Product report, each of them will give us this data:

"Carts" in Products Report: Number of times a Cart was opened for the productX listed as one of the line items in the report. 

"Orders" in Products Report: Number of Orders with productX included in it.

Now if we go back to your Example, For example, Product X shows that there were 46 Carts and 70 Orders.

It is very much possible to have less Carts created for ProductX than it was part of More number of Orders.

Tip:You might want to use Cart Additions as the metrics in Products report instead of carts.  

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Hope this helps!

Regards,

Harsh Kabra |  Adobe Certified Expert: Digital Analytics® & SiteCatalyst Implementation & Reporting®