A customer who fills a cart has done the hardest part: they found the product, compared, and decided. If they stop after that, it isn't for lack of interest. Something happened between the cart and the payment, and that something can be identified.

Cause #1: costs revealed at the last moment

This is by far the leading cause of abandonment. A customer who discovers the shipping costs at the second-to-last step doesn't recalculate: they feel they've been misled, and they leave. The amount matters less than the moment it appears.

Showing shipping costs on the product page, even approximately, even when they're unfavorable, improves the final conversion rate. You lose some customers earlier, but the ones who continue go all the way through.

It's not the price that makes people leave. It's the price that changes along the way.

Cause #2: mandatory account creation

Requiring an account before buying means asking for a commitment from someone who just wanted to pay. Guest checkout, with an offer to create an account after payment, wins back a significant share of these abandonments.

Cause #3: doubts about trustworthiness

  • No real contact details, address or phone number.
  • Return conditions that are impossible to find or worded in a discouraging way.
  • No reviews, or obviously fake ones, which do more harm than having no reviews at all.
  • Vague delivery times: “within 3 to 15 days” reads as “we don't know.”

Cause #4: the payment itself

A heavy form on mobile, missing payment methods customers expect, an alarming redirect, a page that takes eight seconds to respond: at this stage, the slightest friction costs you a sale that was already won. This is the part of your site where every second is worth the most.

Diagnosis in practice

Measure the drop-off from one step to the next: cart viewed, details entered, delivery chosen, payment started, order confirmed. The step where you lose people will stand out immediately. And make a purchase yourself, from a phone, on an average connection: in five minutes, the exercise reveals what six months of statistics hadn't shown.

The two cheapest fixes

Start by showing costs earlier and allowing guest checkout. These are the two cheapest and most profitable fixes in online retail. Only then should you turn to cart reminders: they win customers back, but they don't fix the causes.

An abandoned cart isn't an undecided customer. It's a customer who ran into an obstacle you haven't seen.