One open question for the people who nearly didn't buy and did. They are the only shoppers who can tell you both halves of the story — what the hesitation was, and what got them over it. Everyone else either never hesitated or never came back to explain.
No options to choose from, because the interesting answer is the one you would not have listed.
Read a fortnight of these and the pattern is rarely subtle.
Objections cluster into a short list — shipping cost, sizing or fit uncertainty, is this shop real, price against an alternative, the returns policy, a missing payment method — and the useful thing is not the list, it is which one your buyers keep naming. Every one of them has a cheap answer on the page where it came up: a clearer threshold, a fit note, a visible returns line, a logo that says the payment method exists.
And unlike an A/B test, you are told what to change before you spend traffic on finding out. Four people mentioning the same doubt is a hypothesis with a source attached, which is a much better place to start than a list of things that worked for someone else's store.
This question only reaches people who completed checkout. That is a real limitation and it is not a small one: the shoppers whose objection actually won are not in this dataset, and nothing here can tell you how many of them there were or what they wanted. Anyone claiming a post-purchase survey measures abandonment is selling you something.
What it does give you is the objection in the words of someone who felt it strongly enough to remember and then bought anyway — which means both the problem and, often, the reassurance that resolved it. Fixing that is likely to help the people who left too. You just won't hear it from them.
If the abandoning shopper is genuinely your question, toldby is the wrong tool and we would rather say so: there are no on-site, product-page or exit-intent surveys here at all. The Zigpoll comparison spells out where that line sits and who should cross it.
Free text does not chart. On the free plan you read the feed for the last 24 hours, which on a modest store is a perfectly reasonable daily habit. On Pro the answers are also grouped into recurring themes with counts and verbatim quotes, which is what makes this question survivable at volume.
A good next move once the themes stop surprising you: turn the top three into a multiple-choice question and measure their share properly. The repeat-purchase driver is what that shape looks like, and anything else? is the broader, less pointed cousin of this one.
It is a different crowd, and it is the more articulate one. Someone who hesitated and bought anyway can tell you what the worry was and what settled it — two useful facts. Someone who left can tell you they left, which you already knew. The buyers are a biased sample and still the best witnesses you can get from a post-purchase survey.
Not with toldby. That needs a survey that fires before the sale — on a product page, in a cart, on exit — and toldby has no on-site or pre-purchase surface of any kind. We only ask on Shopify's Thank You and Order Status pages. If the abandoning shopper is your real question, use a tool built for it.
Because the objection that matters is usually not on the list you would write. A multiple-choice version returns a tidy ranking of the five things you already suspected and hides the one nobody had thought of — and that sixth thing is the reason to ask at all. Once a pattern is obvious from the text, converting it into a fixed option is a sensible second step.
It is a fair worry and the framing does the work: the question is retrospective and the doubt is already resolved. It reads as interest in their experience, not as a prompt to reconsider. It is also optional, so anyone who would rather not answer simply does not.
Fewer than you would think, because you are looking for repetition rather than a rate. The same hesitation phrased three different ways by three different people is already a signal worth acting on, and that can happen inside a week on a modest store.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish this one question, and read the objections your product page missed.
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