Trump Store Shopping Cart Abandonment

Overview

Trump Store Shopping Cart Abandonment refers to a late June 2020 raid on Donald Trump's online merchandise store by TikTokers who oppose him. TikTokers uploaded videos of themselves filling up their shopping carts in the online store and then abandoning their purchase to create a problem for the store's data analysis and potentially negatively affect sales.

Background

On June 23rd, 2020, Twitter user @williamlegate^[1] tweeted "It’d be a damn shame if the TikTok army realized the fact that clicking Trump campaign ads on Google costs them several dollars each time… (I don’t condone this)" to which Twitter user @christophurious responded "Go to the trump merch store. Load up your digital cart with as much merch as you can fit. Now instead of checking out, take a little break (or a long one) and go read about the wonderful world of digital shopping cart abandonment and it’s negative effects on available inventory" which gained over 5,500 likes in six days (shown below).

On June 24th, TikToker lil.grac published a screenshot of @christophurious's tweet in a video that garnered over 402,300 likes in five days (shown below).

Developments

On June 24th, 2020, TikTokter probablytom echoed both TikToker lil.grac and Twitter user @christophurious in a video calling for TikTokers to abandon shopping carts in the online Trump merch store (shown below, left). The video acquired over 11,300 likes in five days. That same day, TikToker preveroni used probablytom's sound clip to show how they abandoned a shopping cart filled with over 1.3 million dollars worth of merchandise (shown below, center). The video received over 640,100 likes in five days. The next day, TikToker fatherrari used probablytom's sound to do the same in a video that accumulated over 133,500 likes in three days (shown below, right). The Daily Dot^[2] published an article on the TikTok raid citing Business Insider^[3] who estimated that e-commerce merchants would "lose $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise to abandoned carts in 2016."

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References