Before you invest in cart abandonment

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Before you spend anything on cart abandonment, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The short version

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about cart abandonment before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.