Following up quotations instead of abandoned carts
The Retail pack cannot see abandoned web carts, so it follows up open quotations. How the acceptance link, customer reminders and a weekly review work.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Retail businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Online retailers talk constantly about abandoned carts: shoppers who put something in a basket and left without paying. The physical shop has its own version, and it is just as costly. A customer asks for a price on a set of patio chairs in a colour you would need to order, or on a fridge you would have delivered, takes the quotation home "to think about it", and is never heard from again.
That customer was further along than any abandoned cart. They spoke to a person, got a price and took it away. Yet most shops never follow up, because the quotation lives on paper or in someone's e-mail. The Retail & e-commerce pack in Achekam's Industry CRM treats open quotations as the list to work. This article explains how.
No storefront and no cart data
The Retail pack has no web storefront and cannot see abandoned web carts. If you run a web shop elsewhere, its cart data does not reach the pack.
What the pack does instead is follow up open quotations. Its records are Customer orders, for special orders and returns, and its quotes are Quotations. Every quotation a sales assistant sends is a record with a customer, items, prices and a status, which means it can be listed, sorted and chased.
For a shop that sells big-ticket or made-to-order items, furniture, appliances, bicycles, school uniforms, that list is worth more than cart data, because each line is a named person who has already shown real interest.
Open quotations as the list to work
An open quotation is one that has been sent and neither accepted nor declined. Working the list well means a few habits:
- Quote with an expiry in mind. Supplier prices change; a quotation should say how long it holds.
- Record why quotations are lost. Price, delivery time, found it elsewhere, no longer needed. After a few months, the reasons tell you more than any sales report.
- Close the dead ones. A list full of quotations nobody will ever accept hides the ones worth a call.
What the customer sees on the acceptance link
The easier you make it for a customer to say yes, the fewer quotations go cold. The customer can accept a quotation on a link by typing their name and ticking a box, and the acceptance drafts the invoice in receivables.
Behind that simple step sit a few protections:
- The link's token is stored only as a hash.
- The customer's IP address and browser are kept with the acceptance.
- A sent quotation is frozen; it can be changed only by a revision, so the customer always accepts exactly what they were sent.
- Issuing the invoice straight away needs an administrator's recorded authority; otherwise the invoice waits as a draft for a person.
For the shop, that means an accepted quotation turns into a draft invoice without anyone retyping it, and there is a record of who accepted what, and when. The record itself is described in what an online quote acceptance records, and the path from quotation to special order and invoice in special orders from quote to invoice.
Customer reminders an administrator switches on, sent once and capped
The pack can remind customers, within limits that keep it from becoming a nuisance. Each customer reminder stays off until a workspace administrator switches it on. Each is sent at most once, and sending is limited by a daily cap.
So a customer with an open quotation does not receive a stream of chasers. Each kind of reminder goes out once at most, and only if your administrator has chosen to send it at all.
Before switching reminders on, think about consent. A reminder about a quotation the customer asked for is different from marketing, but the line can blur if the message starts promoting other products. In South Africa, the Information Regulator's guidance note on direct marketing under POPIA explains how the Act treats electronic marketing, including consent and marketing to existing customers. Keep quotation reminders about the quotation.
E-mail and in-app only
Reminders go by e-mail and in the app only. There is no SMS and no WhatsApp channel.
Many retail customers ask for prices on WhatsApp and would answer a follow-up there faster. If that is your shop, keep personal WhatsApp follow-ups as part of the sales assistant's routine, and use the pack's e-mail reminder as a backstop. Make sure the customer's e-mail address is captured on the quotation; a reminder cannot reach a customer with no address on file. The same channel limits apply to collection reminders, described in reminders for uncollected orders.
A weekly quotation review for the floor manager
Set aside a fixed slot each week, on a quiet morning, for the floor manager to go through open quotations:
- Sort by age. Start with quotations sent in the last week or two; these are the warmest.
- Call the biggest ones. For the highest-value quotations, a personal call beats any reminder.
- Check supplier prices. If a supplier has raised prices, revise the quotation before the customer accepts the old one.
- Close the lost ones, with a reason.
- Share out the calls, so no customer hears from two people about the same quotation.
Run your first review this week with whatever open quotations you can find, on paper or in e-mail, so that the habit is in place before the pack arrives.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
