You pick a pair of shoes, add them to your cart and move on to delivery. That's where a PLN 19.99 shipping fee appears, one the product page never mentioned. You close the tab and look for the same shoes somewhere else.
Shopping cart abandonment is everyday reality for the whole industry: according to a Baymard Institute meta-analysis of 50 studies, an average of 70.22% of carts end without a purchase. The number sounds alarming, but on its own it says very little. Some people use the cart as a wishlist or a way to compare prices and never planned to pay. The ones worth fighting for are the rest: shoppers who were ready to buy and got stopped along the way. Most of these obstacles can be found without expensive tools, as long as you know where to look.
What cart abandonment rate is normal?
The cart abandonment rate shows what share of people with a product in their cart leave the store without buying. It's simple to calculate: take the share of orders among sessions with an add-to-cart and subtract it from 100%. If 1,000 people added something to their cart in a month and you got 280 orders, your rate is 72%.
Baymard Institute has been collecting this data for years, combining results from independent studies. In its latest summary the average is 70.22%, and across more than a decade of measurements it has stayed between the high 60s and low 70s. Over that time stores moved en masse to one-page checkouts, yet the rate improved by only about 0.3 percentage points a year. Part of cart abandonment is simply how people shop online, and no optimization will change that.
That's why the industry average works as a reference point, but not as a target. Industry averages hide big differences within each sector: a luxury fashion store and a budget clothing dropshipper sit in the same category but have completely different benchmarks. Your own results from previous months make a better point of comparison.
It's also worth separating two numbers that often get mixed up. Cart abandonment covers everyone who added a product and didn't buy. Checkout abandonment only counts people who started placing an order and reached the delivery or payment form. The second number shows problems in the purchase process more clearly, because it filters out browsers. If you only have time to track one metric regularly, pick that one.
Which abandoned carts you can recover - and which aren't worth chasing
Baymard regularly asks US shoppers why they abandoned their cart. The most common answer is that they were just browsing and weren't ready to buy: 42% of respondents give it. This group includes people comparing prices, saving products for later or looking for gift ideas.
You won't win these carts back by fixing your checkout, and there's no reason to try. For these people the cart works as a wishlist. A reminder email or remarketing may reach some of them once they're ready to buy, but that's about all you can do.
The second group are shoppers who wanted to pay and got stopped along the way: a shipping fee, a mandatory account, a form stretched across two screens. Only changes to the purchase process itself work here. A reminder email won't help much, because the shipping fee is just as high when they open it as when they closed the tab.
The stakes are high. According to Baymard, an average large e-commerce site can increase its conversion rate by 35.26% through better checkout design alone, and most checkouts could show 20 to 60% fewer form fields.
That's why a more sensible goal is removing the obstacles that stop people who are ready to buy. The abandonment rate itself depends on the season, ad traffic and the number of browsers, so it makes a poor target. The obstacles in your purchase process, on the other hand, are entirely in your hands.
Why shoppers abandon carts - causes your store controls
Before anyone adds a product to their cart, they first have to stay on the page for more than a few seconds. I cover that earlier stage in the article on why people leave a website after just a few seconds. Here we're looking at people who got further and have something in their cart. Once browsers are filtered out, Baymard's research sorts their reasons into three groups.
Costs that show up too late
Extra costs are the most common cause a store can fix: 39% of shoppers in this group point to shipping, fees and taxes. Another 14% leave because they couldn't see the total order cost upfront.
The problem is rarely the size of the fee itself. What matters is when it appears: the later it shows up, the more it looks like a hidden cost. Someone who sees the shipping price on the product page makes an informed decision. The same person, surprised by a new amount at the last step, starts wondering what else the store might be hiding.
A form that asks for too much
One in five shoppers in this group gives up when the store requires an account (19%). Almost as many (18%) find the checkout too long or complicated.
Both causes come down to the same thing: the store asks for effort before the customer gets what they came for. An account helps the store build a relationship, but on a first purchase it's just an extra step for the shopper. The fix has been known for years: guest checkout, with an offer to create an account after the order is placed, when all that's left is adding a password.
An account helps the store build a relationship, but on a first purchase it's just an extra step for the shopper.
Doubts about payment and delivery
Almost one in five people (19%) don't trust the site enough to enter their card details, and 21% give up because delivery is too slow.
Trust is built by small details: recognizable payment provider logos, a checkout that looks consistent with the rest of the store, clear information about returns. Delivery time works much like cost. Waiting three days is acceptable if you know about it from the start. It's worse when the delivery date only comes out after filling in the form.
Is your product ready to scale?
Let's identify your high-drop-off points and implement design interventions that keep users engaged
Let's talk strategyCart abandonment on mobileh
Carts are abandoned noticeably more often on phones. In Dynamic Yield's data the rate is 80.45% on smartphones and 68.62% on desktops. In Poland this matters even more, because the smartphone is the main shopping device for 82% of online buyers (Gemius 2025).
Part of the gap comes from habits: people browse more on their phones and buy later on a computer. The checkout itself adds the rest. A form that takes a minute on desktop turns into a series of small obstacles on a small screen: fields without address autofill, a letter keyboard for the phone number, checkboxes that are too small, a login required halfway through. On top of that comes switching between apps at payment, because the bank payment code has to come from a banking app and the store's session doesn't always wait.
The simplest test takes fifteen minutes: buy something from your own store on your phone, one-handed, with no saved details. Every moment you hesitate is a candidate for a fix.
A form that takes a minute on desktop turns into a series of small obstacles on a small screen
How to find out why shoppers abandon carts in your store
Research shows where to look. Only your own data gives the answer for your store, and free tools plus a few hours of work are enough for a first diagnosis.
Check your purchase funnel in GA4. In Explorations, build a funnel from the e-commerce events in order: add to cart (add_to_cart), begin checkout (begin_checkout), shipping selected (add_shipping_info), payment selected (add_payment_info) and purchase (purchase). The step with the biggest drop is where you start. If your store doesn't send these events, implementing them is the first task.
Split the funnel by device. The same funnel broken down into smartphones and computers quickly shows whether the problem affects the whole process or mainly the mobile version.
Watch session recordings. Microsoft Clarity is free and lets you filter sessions where someone started checkout but didn't place an order. Look for repeated clicks on the same element, returns to the cart and moments when the cursor hovers over one amount for a long time. A dozen such recordings often tell you more than a month of reports.
Go through a purchase yourself. Repeat the phone test described above, this time also on a computer and with a different delivery method than the one you usually pick.
Ask the people who leave. One question when someone exits the cart, for example "What stopped you from buying?", with a few answer options and a field for their own. Even a few dozen answers let you tell a price problem from a form problem.
These steps are enough to find the most obvious obstacles. A full audit goes further: it combines analytics data with expert review and user testing, and ends with a list of fixes ranked by their impact on sales. I describe what that process looks like step by step in the article on UX audits
A full audit goes further: it combines analytics data with expert review and user testing, and ends with a list of fixes ranked by their impact on sales.
Where to start fixing
Not every fix requires rebuilding your store. The biggest gains usually come from changes that take a few hours:
- Shipping cost and the free shipping threshold visible on the product page, plus a note in the cart showing how much is left to free delivery.
- Guest checkout, with an offer to register only after the order is placed.
- A form cut down to the fields the order genuinely can't be fulfilled without.
Bigger changes, such as redesigning the mobile checkout, are worth planning once the GA4 funnel points to a specific step. Then you know what you're fixing and how to measure the effect.
Leave abandoned cart emails for last. They work on people who got distracted or are undecided, but they won't remove the obstacle that stopped everyone else. Fix the purchase process first, then aim reminders at the smaller group that remains.
If you do only one thing after reading this, go through your own checkout on a phone today and note every place where a new amount appears. That's where the problem usually starts.
If you'd like someone from outside to review your whole purchase path and rank fixes by their impact on sales, see how [LINK: E-commerce Optimization service page] works at scron.
