How to decrease shopping cart abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is when a shopper adds products to the basket and leaves your online shop without paying. To bring it down, show the full cost early, keep the checkout short and trustworthy, and remind shoppers who leave.

What is shopping cart abandonment?

Any basket with products in it that doesn't become an order counts as an abandoned shopping cart, wherever the shopper leaves. Checkout abandonment is the narrower case: the shopper has already started the checkout and leaves part of the way through. Both show you where shoppers lose interest, and the fixes overlap.

Across 50 studies of online shopping cart abandonment, Baymard Institute found an average documented rate of 70.22%. A large part of that is a natural result of how people shop online: they browse, compare prices and save products for later. So don't aim for zero. Watch your own shopping cart abandonment rate over time and look for the problems you can fix.

How to work out your abandonment rate

Divide the number of completed orders by the number of baskets started, subtract the result from 1 and multiply by 100. For example, say 400 shoppers put something in their basket last month and 100 of them placed an order. 100 divided by 400 is 0.25, 1 minus 0.25 is 0.75, and 0.75 times 100 gives a rate of 75%.

Your order list gives you the completed orders. The baskets started come from your shop's statistics or your analytics tool. If your shop sends ecommerce data to Google Analytics, a product added to the basket is recorded as an add_to_cart event. Count the shoppers who triggered that event rather than the events themselves, as one basket often holds several products. Work out your rate over the same length of time each time you check, and look out for sudden rises.

Why shoppers abandon their basket

When Baymard asked US online shoppers why they had left a basket, leaving out those who were just browsing, these were among their most common answers:

• The extra costs, such as delivery, taxes or other fees, were too high. 40% of shoppers named this one.
• The delivery options were too slow for them.
• They didn't trust the site with their card details.
• The shop wanted them to create an account before they could pay.
• The checkout took too long or asked too much of them.
• They weren't satisfied with the returns policy.
• They couldn't see or work out the full order cost before checkout.
• The card was declined, or the payment method they wanted wasn't offered.

The survey asked shoppers in the US, so treat the shares as a guide and check which of these problems your own shop has. According to Baymard, many of these reasons for shopping cart abandonment can be fixed through design changes alone.

How to reduce shopping cart abandonment

Many of the reasons above are in your hands: what shoppers pay, what you ask of them and whether paying feels safe.

Show the full cost before checkout

Extra costs top the list, so don't let delivery charges come as a surprise at the last step. Show delivery costs and delivery times on the product page or in the basket, and show prices with VAT. If delivery depends on where the customer lives, let them check the cost with their postcode before they start the checkout. If you can offer free delivery, even only above a certain order value, say so early, right on the product page.

Let shoppers check out as a guest

Asking for an account before payment is one of the easiest reasons to remove. Offer a guest checkout, where customers can buy without creating an account. For a first-time customer especially, buying should take as little effort as possible. In Baymard's testing, offering the account on the confirmation page, after the order, worked better than asking up front. By then, the shopper has already entered their details, so creating the account can take just a password.

Keep the checkout short

In Baymard's benchmark, most checkouts are five to six steps long, counting from the basket to the order review. The number of form fields matters more than the number of steps, though. In Baymard's testing, most sites need only 8 form fields in their checkout, yet in 2024 the average checkout asked for 11.3. Ask only for what you need to deliver the order and take the payment. Keep the steps in a clear order, ending with a review page where the shopper checks the order before placing it. Leave out extra text and links that distract from paying. Our guide to an optimised checkout process goes through each step in more detail.

Make paying feel safe

Shoppers hesitate when they have to type in their credit card information on a site they don't know. SSL encryption, which today runs on the TLS protocol, protects the connection between the shopper's browser and your shop, so their card details stay private on their way to you. Before the last step, show which cards you accept and a clear returns policy. Offer more than one way to pay, for example PayPal as well as cards. It's also worth putting the word "secure" on the checkout button, as in "Proceed to secure checkout". If you're about to set up an online shop, choose a shop builder with secure payments and several payment methods built in.

Add your products, set your delivery rates and take all major credit and debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Your shop has SSL from day one, and we don't take a commission on your sales. Only the standard payment processing fees from Stripe or PayPal apply.

Measure and test your checkout

Once you've made the obvious fixes, use your figures to find the next one. Start with the checkout step where shoppers leave. In Google Analytics, a funnel exploration shows the steps shoppers take through your checkout and how well they get through each one. When you change something, such as the wording on a button or the order of the fields, run an A/B test. Your visitors are split at random between the old version and the new one, so you can see whether the change helped rather than trusting a hunch.

How to win back shoppers who leave

Shopping cart recovery brings shoppers back to the basket they left, with a reminder by email or an ad. The aim is to reach them while they still remember what they wanted.

Send an abandoned cart email

An abandoned cart email reminds the shopper of what they left behind. It works best when the email address is the first field of your checkout, so you have it even if the shopper leaves. A good reminder shows the products left in the basket and links straight back to it, so the shopper can carry on where they stopped.

You don't need to send these reminders by hand. Look for an abandoned cart email in your shop's settings or email tool, and send it only to shoppers who ticked the consent box below. Write the text once, and in most cases send the first one within an hour of the shopper leaving.

In the UK, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) set the rules for marketing emails to individual customers. A reminder that promotes your products can count as one. Under regulation 22, you may send marketing emails without consent only if three conditions are met. You got the address during a sale or negotiations for a sale, and you only promote similar products and services. You also gave the person a simple way to refuse, free of charge apart from the cost of sending the refusal, both when you collected the address and in every message.

The regulation itself speaks of “the sale or negotiations for the sale” without saying whether a basket left at checkout counts as negotiations. That makes asking for consent the safe choice. We recommend a clear tick box right beside the email field, so shoppers can agree before they go any further. If someone leaves without ticking it, don't send them a reminder that promotes your products. Every reminder you do send also needs a valid address the shopper can use to ask for these emails to stop.

Remind them with ads

Retargeting shows ads to people who have already visited your shop, and with dynamic remarketing in Google Ads those ads can show the products they looked at. Make sure the ad brings the shopper back to their basket, not to your homepage, so they don't have to search for the products again.

If you're starting a new shop, build an online shop with us and plan these fixes in from the start, from showing the full cost early to keeping the checkout short.