Hey, venture capitalists! Looking for a withering one-liner to use when you’re dressing down the leadership of an underperforming ecommerce startup? Try this:

“Are you running a business, or a charity for abandoned shopping carts?”

You’re welcome! That’ll be $30,000.

For what it’s worth, here are five things that make me abandon my shopping cart:

• Businesses trying to sell outside the United States, using forms built by developers who aren’t aware there is an “outside the United States”. So the postal code’s limited to five characters. Or when I select my country, the form still makes me choose from one of the fifty states (or, if it’s feeling generous, Puerto Rico and Guam as well).
• Forms that step me through a “convenient” eighty-step process, with no clue as to how far we are from the end. If I’m finally filling in my credit card details, and the children look noticeably older than when I first clicked the checkout button, I’m out of here.
• Shipping sticker shock. “Oh, you live in Canada? Let me recalculate your shipping costs. …Wow. Uh, how much equity do you have in your house?”
• Mystery formats with uninformative error messages. “Oooooo, that’s not the format we use for phone numbers. Try guessing again.” Especially effective combined with…
• Amnesia do-overs. “Nope, that wasn’t it either. Try again… with a completely blank form.”