What to ask your agency about cart abandonment

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on cart abandonment, these questions are worth asking early.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

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.