I am curious about how the other store owners are doing with Non-Finalized. I usually get upwards of 2-3 a week and that seems awfully high for me. I contact all of my Non-Finalized customers and almost always hear that they had a problem during the ordering process. I have talked to and they believe its the way I setup my website. I was curious about everyone's experience with Non-Finalized and if this is a regular occurence or just something with my company.
Thanks

I am not sure how many sales you convert a week... but 2-3 not-finalized orders actually seems very low. Shopping Cart abandonment occurs more than you would think for hundreds of reasons...

The not-finalized order process was built to provide a method to contact customers who abandoned their cart mid-way through the check-out process.

You should definately follow up with the customers and ask what issue they had...? Did the site time-out? Did they get booted form their dial-up connection? If there is a problem with your design or functionality of your site?

We generally have 5 per month. However, when sending an email template all of the non-finalized customers explaining that we are willing to answer any questions they may have we cut the number in half. So far all have been due to non-technical issues. (i.e: second thoughts, credit card maxed out, etc)

The Not Finalized section is one of the best features I think MonsterCommerce provides. We take the opportunity to call or email the potential customer, possibly provide a discount when calling, to entice them to complete the sale. Almost 99% of the time, we covert the transaction into a sale.

While it is true at times customers may have problems with the shopping cart, they usually let us know right away! Especially if they really want to order the product, we start receiving floods of phone calls to alert us of a problem so we can alert Tech Support.

I totally agree! My previous store, through another company, didn't have this feature. It's great to be able to contact 'potential' customers who did everything except hit the final order button.

I get these after upgrades, call and they fix it.

Other than that, not many. I contact my customers and 99% of the time they had problems checking out---their fault or an upgrade.

What type of email communication did you have with Non-finalized that helped you turn them into buyers. I am so afraid infringing on their privacy and making them never come back that I haven't really done anything with them but I hate to pass these folks up. Does anyone have an email template they could share or ideas that worked for you. I would appreciate it

We use the following:

Thanks for sharing that Ultimate. I agree with you... shopping cart abandonment is very common. Shoppers gets distracted, bumped off their AOL connection etc, etc. From my experiences with my stores, the majority of shoppers really appreciate the follow-up.

I like how you included the privacy comment in the e-mail below. Very well done.

We usually mention the entire order (order #, what they wanted to order, date, etc.). We mention that they either decided not to finish the order or had a problem during the ordering process. We say "In our quest for quality customer service we are contacting you to find out if you in fact wanted to place this order, we can ship it out A.S.A.P.", not those exact words but I was paraphrasing.
Most of the time its because they change their mind last minute, or they don't like the shipping cost. With a quick email showing them you care and that you are a good company, than most likely they will be happy to finish the order with you.

It seems that the order has to stay in pending for the customer to get back to it and finish it, If it has been moved to non-finalized it is not accessible. Is that the case or is there something wrong with my shopping cart?

Danilyn-

Actually, that's not quite how it works. What happens right now is that after a customer fills out the first page of their order, and goes to the second page, the order is now in the "Not Finalized" area. Then, lets say, they decide to go click on something else, put something in the cart, remove some things, click around your store some more, and then go back into checkout... Once they hit the second page of checkout again, their order is updated, but still resides in the Not Finalized area.

What actually makes an order not accessible when it's not finalized is when a session ends. Then all is cleared, and the order is a permanent fixture in your Not Finalized bin... that is until you contact them and make sure all went well with their shopping experience.

When an order is Pending, at that point, the whole checkout process has completed from start to finish. Then they can log on and check their order through the orderstatuslogin.asp page provided (as long as you link to it on your site).

Hope this clears some things up!

Sabres00,

I think a great idea would be to add a button that allows you to "check off" the non-finalized orders and click a "send notification" button which inturn sends the customers a customized email explaining that the order was not sucessfully processed and how to contact customer service if they experienced a problem or have questions and would like to proceed with this order. Or... maybe anything thats in "Non-Finalized" for more than x hours automatically sends one?

Right now I do this manually.

Just another idea...

Thats a great idea Ultimate. We currently do all of ours automatically also, but every once in a while we will overlook non-finalized for a few days and once its gone that long its hard to get the sale still. An automatic email would save this problem and save us time, which all turns into money.

Yes i agree with strapworks this would be a great feature to have.