Cart abandonment: a practical guide

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. This guide covers what cart abandonment actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What is actually at stake

Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How to approach it

A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason
• A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones
• Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Where it usually goes wrong

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

What to do next

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.