All good points.
As far as pulling cards, I do not pull until I have an agreement in principle. It was taking way too long to pull cards when a good percentage never responded or the trade ended up much different with countering back and forth. I was spending way too much time pulling all the cards and then putting them all back.
The key here is to be very organized and make sure your data entry is good and that you have the cards that the database says you have.
I would like to reiterate to include the transaction number. Some of us have up to 20 trades in flight at one time and I have had some where it took me several minutes to find which trade it is from.
I would also like to add a additional one:
Keep you wantlist up to date.
It has happened a few times where the person comes back and says that they don't really want those cards anymore. The only way for someone to know what cards that you are interested in is by putting them on your wantlist. If you don't want the cards anymore, that is cool, just make sure to remove them from you wantlist.
In order to get my abandoned proposal rate down, I now send a message first and ask if they are interested in trading. If they don't respond to that then they most likely would not have responded to the trade. This has moved my adandoned rate down but I am still probably at 10% of people not responding to a trade within a week even though they said they wanted to trade in the message.