Money leaves your store every day without a word. According to the Baymard Institute, which combines 50 published studies, the average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. That is the norm in e-commerce. What matters is what you do about the share that was not lost for good.
To make it concrete with an invented example: if the average order is €60 and 500 carts are abandoned in a month, that is €30,000 left on the table. Recovering even 10% would mean €3,000 more per month without a single new visitor.
Why shoppers really leave
Baymard asked shoppers directly. According to its summary, 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing”. They were never going to buy today, and it is hard to work with that group.
For the rest, the reasons look like this (multiple answers possible):
- Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees): 40%
- Delivery too slow: 20%
- No trust in the site with card details: 19%
- The site required an account: 18%
- Checkout too long or complicated: 17%
- Website errors or crashes: 17%
- Unsatisfactory returns policy: 13%
- Total order cost not visible up front: 12%
- Card declined: 10%
- Not enough payment methods: 9%
Baymard’s data comes from US shoppers, so treat the percentages as a guide, not a forecast for your market. The pattern is still useful: most of these are design and communication problems, not “the product was bad”.
Technical causes: when checkout physically fails
A slow checkout is the quietest killer. Google’s research found that more than half of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes over three seconds to load.
Payment methods are a regional matter. In the Baltics many buyers expect to pay through their internet bank. Without local bank payments, part of your audience cannot or will not pay by card.
Mobile checkout deserves special attention. If filling in the form on a phone is painful, shoppers postpone the purchase or leave altogether. Our note on mobile readiness lists what to check.
UX causes: small things that cost a lot
Surprise delivery costs. A shopper adds a €29 product and sees €7.90 delivery on the last step. They feel misled. Show delivery costs on the product page or early in checkout.
Mandatory registration. Offer guest checkout, and let the customer save details after the order, not before.
Trust signals. Is it clear on your checkout page who you are? Secure-payment marks, a returns policy, real reviews and a contact phone number all help.
Fixes worth trying
- A progress indicator (1/3, 2/3, 3/3): the buyer knows how long it takes.
- A simpler checkout. Where possible, one page with all fields instead of four steps. Test it against your current flow before committing.
- One exit-intent offer at most: “Leave your e-mail and we will send a reminder.” Do not be aggressive.
- An abandoned-basket e-mail sequence, for example after 1 hour, 24 hours and 72 hours. It is among the easiest revenue a store leaves on the table, and it needs the customer’s consent under GDPR.
- Mobile basics: large buttons, a numeric keyboard for number fields, wallet payments.
How we work on checkout
Checkout is often where the most important work in an online store happens, more than design or SEO. We start with data: the checkout funnel in analytics and heatmaps. We pick one or two critical problems, fix them rather than everything at once, and measure the result.
If you have an online store, we can review the current checkout and tell you what is happening in it. Related reading: five mistakes when building an online store.
Next step
An abandoned cart is rarely the customer’s fault. Most often it is a checkout problem, and it can be fixed.
Contact us for a checkout review
Sources
- Baymard Institute, Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics, accessed November 2026
- Think with Google, Mobile page speed benchmarks, 2016
