Abandoned checkout best practices

In this guide, you’ll learn checkout best practices to ensure the Abandoned Cart Recovery Solution can work properly.

Consent from the user

Make sure that your recipients agreed on receiving messages from your company.

We recommend for this to be included in your Terms & Conditions or even a separate tick box when people agree for you to store their contact details in your system. In addition, be sure to be fully compliant with the GDPR. Learn more about how the GDPR affects Shopify merchants.

Make sure to collect the users' phone number

For users to receive your message via MessageBird’s Abandoned Cart Recovery Solution, you need to collect their phone number during the checkout. Otherwise, there is no way for us to know to which number the message should be sent.

Some customers don't like to provide their phone number during the online checkout, so they might abandon their cart if you make it a required field. To avoid this, make your users feel secure about providing their phone numbers by following UI best practices; the key is explaining why their phone number is required.

Shopify checkout form options

Shopify checkout form is where you determine how checkouts should work and be displayed. The settings on this page are critical for the MessageBird Abandoned Cart solution to work properly. You can learn how to edit the Shopify checkout form options in this guide.

In the following, we’ll break down the different sections of the Shopify checkout form for you to know exactly what the best practices are:

Customer account

• Accounts disabled: We will get only what the abandoning user entered on the checkout form.

• Accounts optional: We will sometimes get the customer details in checkout events and sometimes only abandon user inputs.

• Accounts required: We will always get "customer" details on checkout events.

Customer contact

• Either email or phone number: We can get either or both values in the checkout event.

• Can only checkout with email: We can only retrieve phones if users are logged in, and as part of the "customer" object in the AC event.

Form options

• Require the last name only: We will never get the first name as part of the AC event, but might be able to see it in the "customer" section if the user was logged in.

Order processing

• This doesn't affect your engagement strategy, but it is likely to be a great hint for likeliness to recover. We'd recommend requiring confirmation + enabled Address Autocompletion

Abandoned checkout

• We highly recommend unchecking the box for Automatically sent abandoned checkout emails to avoid duplication of messages and spamming.

• Abandoned checkouts sent to and sent after: Might be useful for future phases, when this delay is managed by customers.

Checkout language

• It might be useful to determine what language to use in message templates.