Almost five years ago, I wrote a blog entry (How ColdFusion can save your business!) that discussed how you can use the simple act of session expiration to track, and manage, abandoned user processes on your site. The title was a bit over the topic, but the use case, noticing folks bailing out of the order process on a particular step, was something that I thought could be critical to a business.

I bring this up this weekend because earlier in the week I did some shopping at Zazzle. This was for something super important (ok, maybe not), but when I got to the shipping part of my order, I realized I would not be able to get my item in time unless I paid a lot of money. Since it wasn't really that important to me, I closed the tab and forgot about it.

This morning I got an email from Zazzle. Check it out:

I love how they call me a valued customer and how they talk about my "carefully selected" items. A bit much - but - you have to admit - this is great followup. I don't think it's clear in the shot (and it may not even be in it), but the email also says:

If you had trouble with our order process and require assistance with your order, please contact our customer service team: support@zazzle.com.

It's pretty small text. I'd maybe make it a bit bigger to make it more obvious. Either way - you could easily do the same in an e-commerce ColdFusion site.