How to reduce cart abandonment in an online store

Baymard Institute averages 50 studies of cart abandonment and puts the rate at 70.22%. In its survey of US online shoppers, 42% had left a cart only because they were browsing or not ready to buy. Those carts are not a checkout problem, and no fix will save them.

Among the rest, the reasons are concrete: extra costs such as shipping, taxes and fees (40%), slow delivery (20%), not trusting the site with card details (19%), being made to create an account (18%), a long or complicated checkout (17%), errors or crashes (17%), a weak returns policy (13%), not seeing the total cost up front (12%), a declined card (10%) and too few payment methods (9%).

Baymard estimates that large online stores could raise their conversion rate by 35.26% by fixing checkout problems it has documented. Most of the fixes below cost little more than an afternoon.

Surprise costs are the biggest single reason, so fix them first. Show the delivery price on the product page or in the cart, not for the first time on the payment step. If delivery depends on the address, show a range or a calculator.

A free delivery threshold works better than hiding the fee: say "free delivery above $50" and show in the cart how far the shopper is from it. Many add an item to reach it instead of leaving.

Include taxes in the displayed price where buyers expect it, and avoid fees that appear only at the end, such as a handling or service charge.

Offer guest checkout. Ask for an account after the order is paid, on the thank-you page, when it costs the shopper nothing.

Cut every field you do not need. One name field instead of two, no second address line by default, no phone number unless the courier needs it. Let the browser autofill addresses and cards.

Test the whole checkout on a phone with a slow connection once a week and after every change to the shop. A broken payment step can run for days before anyone notices.

Offer the payment methods your buyers use: cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the local ones that matter in your market. Each missing method is a reason to leave.

A first-time buyer is asking: is this shop real, will the order arrive, and can I send it back? Put the answers next to the button, not on a separate page: delivery time, returns window, and a link to reviews.

Show the payment logos and say how the card is handled. Keep the checkout on the same domain or clearly branded, so the shopper does not wonder where they have been sent.

Write the returns policy in plain words. "30 days to return, we pay the return label" turns a hesitation into an order.

An abandoned cart email reaches people who already chose a product, which makes it one of the best performing emails a shop sends. In Klaviyo's benchmark of abandoned cart flows, an average of 3.33% of recipients placed an order, and the best tenth of shops reached 7.69%. Omnisend reports that in 2025 one in two people who clicked an automated welcome or abandoned cart email went on to buy.

A common sequence is three emails: the first within an hour, as a simple reminder with a picture of the product and a link straight back to the cart; the second about a day later, answering the usual doubts (delivery, returns, reviews); the third two or three days later, and only this one with an incentive if you use one.

You can only email shoppers whose address you have, so ask for the email as the first checkout field. Without it, recovery is impossible.

A discount in the first reminder teaches regular buyers to leave the cart and wait for a code. Keep incentives for the last email, and for first-time buyers only.

Make the incentive single-use and short-lived, for example a code that expires in 48 hours. A shared code ends up on coupon sites and gets used by people who were going to pay full price.

Free delivery is often enough, because the delivery cost was the reason many of these shoppers left. Use the discount calculator to check what a percentage off does to your margin before you send it.

Some shoppers leave without giving an email. A message shown when the visitor is about to leave the page, or after some time on the cart, is the last chance to keep them.

A prize game converts better there than a plain box: the visitor spins or scratches once, wins a code of their own and has a reason to finish now. In DealCraft the prize is decided on the server before the animation runs, every code is single-use with an expiry you choose, and a budget cap and a maximum number of winners keep the cost fixed in advance.

Show it once per visitor and make it easy to close. A pop-up that blocks the checkout itself does more harm than good.

Your cart abandonment rate is one minus completed orders divided by carts created, over the same period. If 1,000 carts were created and 280 orders were paid, your rate is 72%.

More useful is where people leave: from cart to checkout, from checkout to payment, from payment to order. Most shop platforms and analytics tools show this funnel. A big drop at one step tells you which fix to make first.

Change one thing at a time and compare two weeks before and after, away from sales and holidays. Track recovered orders from emails separately, so you know what the emails earn and what the incentives cost.