How to get cart abandonment right
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. The short answer to cart abandonment is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Why it matters
Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones
- Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What to do next
How to tell if yours is fine
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
- 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.