The average ecommerce store loses roughly 7 out of every 10 shoppers at checkout. Most site owners treat that as background noise — a cost of doing business online. It isn’t. Cart abandonment usually has a small number of specific, fixable causes, and most stores are only addressing one or two of them.
Here are the five that consistently move the needle, in the order we’d tackle them.
1. Surprise Costs at the Final Step
Nothing kills a sale faster than a shipping fee or tax amount that appears for the first time on the payment page. The shopper has already mentally committed to a price, and any jump feels like a bait-and-switch — even if it wasn’t intended that way.
Fix: Show shipping costs (or a clear “free over £X” threshold) on the product page and in the cart, not just at checkout. If costs vary by region, let shoppers enter their postcode early rather than at the last step.
2. Forcing Account Creation Before Checkout
Requiring a full account signup before someone can buy adds friction at the exact moment a shopper is most likely to change their mind. Many will simply close the tab rather than create yet another password.
Fix: Offer guest checkout as the default path, with account creation as an optional step after the order is placed — when the shopper has less reason to abandon and more reason to want order tracking.
3. A Checkout That Takes Too Many Steps
Every additional page, field, or click between “add to cart” and “order confirmed” is another chance for a shopper to get distracted, hesitate, or lose their connection. Long checkouts don’t just delay purchases — they lose them outright.
Fix: Audit your checkout flow and count the steps. If it’s more than three (cart → details → payment), look for fields you can remove, combine, or auto-fill using saved browser data.
4. No Recovery Path for Abandoned Carts
Most shoppers who leave without buying didn’t decide “no” — they got interrupted, compared prices elsewhere, or ran out of time. Without a way to bring them back, that interest simply evaporates.
Fix: Set up an abandoned cart email sequence — typically one reminder within an hour, a second within 24 hours, and a final one with a small, time-limited incentive if needed. Even a basic two-email sequence recovers a meaningful share of otherwise-lost sales.
5. Payment Options That Don’t Match How Your Customers Actually Pay
If your checkout only accepts card payments and your customers are used to PayPal, Apple Pay, or buy-now-pay-later options, some will abandon simply because their preferred method isn’t there — not because of price or product.
Fix: Check your analytics for the devices and demographics buying from you, and offer at least one alternative payment method beyond standard card checkout, particularly for mobile shoppers.
Where to Start
Not every store needs all five fixes — most need two or three. The fastest way to know which is to look at where in the funnel people are actually dropping off: product page, cart, or payment step. Each stage points to a different cause, and fixing the wrong one first wastes time without moving the number that matters.
If you’re not sure where your funnel is leaking, our ecommerce web design and conversion optimisation teams can run a checkout audit and show you exactly where shoppers are dropping off — and what to fix first. Get in touch and we’ll take a look.