Retail marketers are under constant pressure to justify every dollar spent.
While digital channels benefit from robust attribution systems, the in-store environment remains murkier. However, an often-overlooked solution can help bridge this gap: better cart management.
When retailers effectively manage carts — whether digital, physical, or hybrid — they unlock opportunities to track, attribute, and optimize marketing efforts across the shopper journey. This article explores how cart management acts as a powerful lever to improve attribution and, ultimately, marketing ROI.
Why Attribution is So Hard in Physical Retail
In digital commerce, tracking cookies and pixels allowretailers to attribute sales to specific campaigns or channels. In contrast,physical stores struggle to answer basic questions:
- What drove a shopper to the store?
- Which campaign led to the sale?
- How do we measure engagement in-store?
According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Adobe, only 22% of retail marketers feel confident in their ability to measure in-store campaign effectiveness.
The Missing Link: Cart-Level Visibility
Cart-level data fills this gap. When retailers capture and manage cart data — through saved carts, mobile self-checkout, associate-assisted mobile POS, or kiosk interactions — they gain visibility into:
- Who built the cart (associate, customer, scan & go)
- When it was built (timestamped event logging)
- What influenced it (promotions, location, product discovery)
This visibility becomes a proxy for intent, engagement, and conversion — a rich signal for attribution.
Cart Management as an Attribution Tool
Here’s how improved cart management directly impacts attribution:
- Ties Cart Events to Marketing Campaigns. By tagging campaigns (e.g., QR codes, wallet passes, geo-targeted push notifications), retailers can trace which shoppers created a cart after engaging with a campaign.
- Links Associates to Conversions. With better cart tools, retailers can track which associate built or assisted with a cart. When a cart is saved and later checked out, attribution can include human interactions — critical for commission systems and real-world A/B testing of associate scripts.
- Captures Abandonment & Recovery Metrics. When carts are saved but not completed, marketing teams can follow up with reminders, retargeting, or segment analysis — much like abandoned cart flows in e-commerce.
Shopify reports that cart recovery emails can lead to up to 26% recovery of lost sales online. Similar logic applies in-store with the right tooling.
The Role of Technology
Emerging tools in retail tech make this possible:
- Mobile self-checkout and Scan & Go platforms link shopper actions to marketing
- Cart management apps unify cart states across POS, kiosks, and associate devices by allowing saving and reloading of carts
- Wallet-based loyalty programs allow campaign targeting without needing app installs
- Beacon and geofence triggers initiate marketing interactions that can be linked to cart activations
Together, these systems form a real-time customer journey map — anchored by the cart as the core unit of analysis. This is especially powerful given that 70% of shoppers prefer using their phone in-store to browse or check out.
Conclusion
Cart management is more than operational convenience — it’s a strategic marketing asset. By turning carts into trackable touchpoints, retailers can reclaim visibility over the in-store shopper journey, close the attribution gap, and drive better returns on marketing investment.
As physical and digital retail continue to converge, the winners will be those who treat the cart as a data-rich object, not just a temporary container.
