Around 70 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout is completed. Baymard Institute puts the figure at 70.22 percent, averaged across roughly 50 separate studies, and that number has barely moved in more than a decade despite years of improvement in checkout technology. Seven in ten is the headline everyone quotes.
On its own, it is close to useless. A large share of those carts were never going to convert, and chasing them wastes effort. The number only becomes worth acting on once you separate the shoppers you lost from the shoppers you never had.
This article explains what cart abandonment actually measures, why people leave, and which changes to your checkout move the number that can be moved.
What cart abandonment actually measures
Cart abandonment is the share of shoppers who add at least one item to their cart and then leave without buying. The rate is calculated as one minus completed purchases divided by carts created. If 100 people fill a cart and 30 check out, your abandonment rate is 70 percent.
There is a distinction worth holding onto, because it changes where you look for the problem.
Cart abandonment happens on the cart page or earlier. The shopper added something, then wandered off, closed the tab, or got distracted.
Checkout abandonment happens after someone has started the checkout process, entered a detail or two, and then bailed. This one is more painful, because a shopper who has begun typing their address has signalled real intent. Something in the checkout itself pushed them out.
Most store owners track a single blended figure and miss which of the two is actually bleeding revenue. Split them, and the diagnosis usually becomes obvious.
Why the 70 percent figure is misleading on its own
Not all abandonment is recoverable, and treating it as if it were leads to wasted spend. Baymard's research finds that a large portion of people who abandon a cart were never ready to buy on that visit. They were price-comparing, saving items for later, checking postage before deciding, or simply browsing the way people browse.
That behaviour is normal and mostly unwinnable. You cannot email a discount code to someone into buying a jacket they were idly considering on their lunch break.
The useful split is between the browsers and the buyers who hit a wall. The browsers are noise. The buyers who hit a wall are the entire game. They wanted the product, started down the path, and met friction serious enough to stop them. Those are the carts worth understanding, and they are the ones your checkout design controls.
So the goal is not to drive abandonment to zero. It is to remove the friction that turns willing buyers into lost ones, and to recover the recoverable few afterwards.
Why shoppers actually abandon their carts
Baymard surveyed online shoppers who had abandoned a cart and asked them why. The answers have stayed remarkably consistent for years, which tells you these are structural problems, not fashions.
Unexpected costs at checkout
Extra costs revealed late are the single most common reason people abandon, cited by nearly half of shoppers who walked away. Shipping, taxes and handling fees that appear only at the payment step break the deal. The shopper did the mental maths on the product price, felt fine about it, then watched the total jump at the last moment and left.
The fix is not always cheaper shipping. It is earlier honesty. Show the full landed cost, or a close estimate, before the checkout flow begins. A shopper who sees the real total on the product or cart page has already accepted it by the time they reach payment.
A free shipping threshold does double duty here. A banner reading "You are $12 away from free shipping" reduces cost-related abandonment and lifts average order value at the same time, and most stores that could run one still do not.
Being forced to create an account
Roughly a quarter of shoppers abandon because the store made them create an account before buying. It is friction with no upside for the customer. They came to buy a product, and you asked them to remember another password.
Guest checkout removes the barrier entirely. Let people buy first, then offer an account afterwards, at the point where saving their details actually benefits them. Most will accept the offer once the purchase is done.
A checkout that is too long or confusing
About one in five shoppers leave because the checkout was too long or too complicated. The average checkout runs to around five steps and eleven form fields by default, and a good deal of that is removable. Every extra field is another small reason to give up.
Cut the form to what you genuinely need to ship the order and take payment. Autofill the rest. Combine steps where you can. A checkout the shopper can finish in one screen on a phone will always beat one that scrolls for a minute.
Not trusting the site with card details
Some shoppers abandon because they do not trust the site with their payment information. Five years ago the standard advice was to bolt on an SSL badge or a security seal. That advice is out of date.
Encrypted connections are now universal. Every legitimate store runs on HTTPS, so it no longer signals anything special, and the old third-party security seals carry far less weight than they once did. Trust today comes from things a shopper can read: visible reviews, a clear returns policy, real contact details, recognisable payment marks at checkout, and a site that simply looks maintained. A padlock icon reassures nobody under 40. A hundred genuine reviews does.
The preferred payment method is missing
A meaningful share of shoppers abandon because the payment option they wanted was not there. Someone who lives inside Apple Pay does not want to type a sixteen-digit card number, and if that is their only option, some of them leave.
Offering the accelerated wallets, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, covers most of this. They also cut friction for everyone else, because a returning shopper can pay in two taps instead of filling a form. On Shopify specifically, stores using accelerated checkout tend to see lower abandonment than those relying on card entry alone.
The Value of an Outside Perspective
Founders often become deeply involved in daily operations, which can make it difficult to recognize structural problems inside the organization. Strategic advisors bring an outside perspective that allows them to evaluate the business objectively.
Because they are not involved in internal politics or daily pressures, advisors can provide unbiased recommendations focused entirely on the company’s success. This fresh perspective often reveals opportunities and challenges that leadership teams may not have previously noticed.
Strengthening Leadership Decisions
Growth often forces founders to make complex decisions involving hiring, investment, expansion, or restructuring. Strategic advisors provide guidance during these critical moments.
They evaluate different options, analyze potential risks, and help leadership teams understand the long-term consequences of their decisions. With expert support, founders can make more confident choices that strengthen the business.
Improving Financial Strategy
Financial planning is a key element of sustainable growth. Advisors work with businesses to develop clear financial strategies that align with their expansion goals.
This includes budgetinThe checkout changes that actually move the number
Diagnosis first, then a short list of changes that consistently pay off.
Show the total cost early. Surface shipping and any fees on the product and cart pages, not at the final step. This addresses the biggest single cause of abandonment and it costs nothing but honesty.
Turn on guest checkout. Remove the forced account. Offer it after the sale instead.
Add accelerated checkout. Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal let returning shoppers skip the form entirely. This is the highest-leverage change most stores have not fully made.
Cut the form down. Every field you remove is a small reduction in abandonment. Ask for what you need to fulfil and charge, and nothing else.
Fix mobile as its own problem. Mobile carts are abandoned at a higher rate than desktop, roughly 80 percent against 66 percent, and mobile is now the majority of ecommerce traffic. A blended abandonment figure hides this. Test the entire checkout on an actual phone, on a normal connection, and fix what is slow or fiddly. This is often where the largest single gain sits.
Speed the page up. A slow cart or checkout page loses shoppers who had already decided to buy. Compress images, cut unnecessary scripts, and measure load time on mobile rather than on your office wifi.
Recovering the carts you can
Prevention does most of the work. Recovery mops up a fraction of what is left, and it is worth doing as long as you are honest about the size of the prize.
Abandoned cart emails are the standard tool. A shopper who abandoned with a real intent to buy gets a reminder, sometimes with an incentive, and a portion come back. Recovery rates from email are modest, typically low single digits of abandoned carts, so treat it as a useful margin rather than a rescue. SMS can lift the total where you have consent, because a text is opened faster than an email.
A few things separate a recovery flow that works from one that annoys:
- Timing matters more than cleverness. The first message within an hour or two, while the intent is warm, does most of the work. A short follow-up a day later catches the rest.
- Hold the discount back at first. Lead with a plain reminder. If you open with money off, you train shoppers to abandon on purpose to trigger the code, and you erode margin on carts that would have converted anyway.
- Do not chase the browsers. Aggressive recovery aimed at people who were never going to buy reads as desperation and burns goodwill.
Recovery is the last line, not the strategy. If your recovery emails are doing heavy lifting, the checkout upstream is the thing to fix.
Browse abandonment is a different problem
Cart abandonment gets the attention, but many shoppers leave before they ever add anything, and that is browse abandonment. It has different causes and different fixes.
Browse abandonment usually points at the product experience rather than the checkout. Thin product pages, missing sizing detail, poor photography, no reviews, or search that returns nothing useful all send people away before a cart exists. Your internal site search is the clearest read on this: a zero-results search is a shopper telling you, in their own words, that you did not show them what they came for.
Fixing browse abandonment is upstream work. Better product content, clearer merchandising, and a search that actually finds things will lift the number of carts created, which is where checkout optimisation then goes to work.
How to tell whether it is working
Judge the effort by where in the funnel the drop-off sits, not by the headline rate.
Track three transitions separately: the drop from product view to add-to-cart, the drop from cart to checkout started, and the drop from checkout started to order placed. Split each by device. The stage with the steepest, most unexpected drop is where your problem lives, and it tells you whether you have a product problem, a cart problem, or a checkout problem.
Then watch a small set of numbers over time. Checkout completion rate is the one that matters most, because it isolates the part of the journey you directly control. Mobile completion rate deserves its own line, since a healthy blended figure can hide a broken phone experience. Average order value tells you whether a free shipping threshold is doing its second job. Recovered revenue from your email and SMS flows tells you what the last line is worth.
If you change one thing at a time and watch checkout completion rate move, you will learn more in a month than a dashboard of forty tiles will teach you in a year. The ecommerce brands Growth Huntr works with almost always find the biggest gain hiding in the mobile checkout, because that is the surface owners test least and shoppers use most.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Treating the 70 percent as all recoverable. Most of it is browsing. Chasing it wastes budget and attention.
- Tracking one blended abandonment rate. Split cart from checkout, and mobile from desktop, or you cannot see the actual problem.
- Leading every recovery email with a discount. You teach shoppers to abandon deliberately and give away margin you did not need to.
- Hiding costs until the payment step. This is the number one cause of abandonment and the easiest to fix.
- Optimising desktop while ignoring mobile. Mobile is the majority of traffic and the higher-abandonment surface. Test on a real phone.
- Bolting on trust badges instead of earning trust. Reviews, a clear returns policy and recognisable payment marks do the job that a security seal used to pretend to.
The pattern across all of it is the same. Reduce the friction that stops people who wanted to buy, be honest about cost early, and make paying fast on the device most of your shoppers are actually using. Do that first, then recover the few real buyers you still lose. If you would rather have someone diagnose exactly where your funnel leaks before you start changing things, that is a conversation we are always happy to have.
g, managing operational costs, planning for taxes, and allocating resources efficiently. Strong financial discipline helps companies avoid common growth-stage problems such as overspending or cash flow instability.
When Businesses Should Seek Strategic Advice
Many founders wait until problems appear before seeking outside guidance. However, strategic advisors can provide the most value during key growth stages. Businesses often benefit from advisory support when launching a new company, entering new markets, preparing for rapid expansion, restructuring operations, or improving financial performance.
Early guidance helps prevent costly mistakes and creates a stronger foundation for long-term success.
Final Thoughts
Scaling a business requires more than ambition and hard work. It requires structure, informed decision-making, and a clear strategy for growth.Strategic advisors provide the expertise and perspective founders need to navigate complex challenges and build companies that can grow sustainably over time. With the right guidance, businesses can move faster, operate more efficiently, and position themselves for long-term success.
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