A practical checklist for cart abandonment

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time cart abandonment comes up.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The checklist

• 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
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about cart abandonment before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason — 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.