A short guide to cart abandonment

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about cart abandonment in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

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.

What it costs to ignore

Unexpected shipping cost is the most common reason. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How we handle it

A single well-timed reminder recovers more than three nagging ones. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Where it usually goes wrong

Fix the checkout before you buy recovery software. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.