A client running a mid-sized online store came to us last year convinced their ad campaigns were broken. Traffic was up 40% quarter over quarter, but revenue barely moved. We pulled their analytics and found the real problem two clicks deep: 71% of people who added something to their cart never finished buying it. The ads were working fine. The checkout was the leak.
That number isn’t unusual, unfortunately. The Baymard Institute has tracked cart abandonment rates averaging around 70% across dozens of studies for years. So if your store sees something in that range, you’re not failing at marketing — you’re dealing with an industry-wide pattern that a handful of concrete fixes can meaningfully improve.
What’s striking is how differently abandonment shows up across industries. Baymard’s data shows travel and electronics stores often see somewhat lower rates than fashion or general retail, largely because those purchases tend to be more deliberate. If you sell impulse-buy items, don’t panic if your number runs higher than a B2B software subscription checkout — compare yourself to stores in your own category where you can, not to a single average pulled from every sector at once.
Why People Actually Leave
It’s rarely one dramatic thing. It’s usually a pile-up of small frictions that, combined, give someone a reason to close the tab and think about it later (which, in practice, means never coming back). The most common culprits we see when auditing a store’s checkout:
Costs That Show Up Too Late
Shipping fees, taxes, and handling charges that only appear on the final step feel like a bait-and-switch, even when they’re not. Shoppers build a mental price in their head the moment they add something to the cart. Surprise that number upward at checkout and you’ve broken trust at the worst possible moment. Showing an estimated total — shipping included — on the product page or cart page removes most of this friction before it starts.
Forced Account Creation
Requiring someone to register before they can buy is still one of the most reliable ways to lose a first-time customer. Guest checkout should always be the default path, with an account offered as an option afterward (ideally auto-created from the order info, so returning is easy without making the first purchase harder).
Too Many Steps, Too Many Fields
Every additional form field is a small tax on a shopper’s patience. Address autocomplete, saved payment info, and combining shipping/billing into a single page when possible all cut down the number of decisions someone has to make before they can finish. A one-page or single-scroll checkout consistently outperforms a multi-page wizard for straightforward orders.
Limited or Untrusted Payment Options
Not offering the payment method someone actually wants to use — whether that’s a digital wallet, buy-now-pay-later, or a regional option common in your market — is an easy way to lose a sale that was otherwise ready to close. And if your checkout page looks unpolished or lacks visible security indicators, hesitation creeps in even from people who fully intended to buy.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Rather than redesigning everything at once, we usually recommend tackling checkout friction in order of impact:
1. Audit your funnel in Google Analytics or your store platform’s checkout reports. Find the exact step where people drop off most. This tells you where to spend your effort first instead of guessing.
2. Add a persistent progress indicator. If checkout takes more than one screen, show people how many steps remain. Uncertainty about how much is left is itself a source of abandonment.
3. Enable guest checkout, full stop. If you only make one change this quarter, make it this one.
4. Show total cost early. Even an estimated range on the cart page, before checkout begins, sets expectations correctly.
5. Test your checkout on a mid-range phone, not just your laptop. A huge share of cart abandonment happens on mobile, often because a button is too small, a field doesn’t trigger the right keyboard, or a page loads slowly. Run your checkout pages through PageSpeed Insights and fix anything flagged as a mobile usability issue. Retailers frequently discover that a checkout button sits half-hidden below the fold on smaller screens, or that autofill fights with a custom-styled input field. None of these are exotic problems, but they’re the kind that only surface when someone actually tests on the device real customers use.
6. Send abandoned cart emails, but don’t over-rely on them. A well-timed reminder recovers some lost sales, but it’s a patch, not a fix. If your abandonment rate is high, the checkout itself needs attention, not just a better follow-up sequence.
Trust Signals Matter More Than People Assume
Beyond speed and simplicity, shoppers are quietly scanning for reassurance the whole way through checkout. A visible security badge near the payment field, a clear return policy linked from the cart, and real customer reviews on the product page all chip away at hesitation. None of these guarantee a completed sale on their own, but stacked together they reduce the number of people who get to the final step and then talk themselves out of it. If your store doesn’t display a returns or refund policy somewhere obvious, that’s worth fixing before anything else on this list — it costs nothing and it’s one of the first things a cautious buyer looks for.
A Word on Expectations
We won’t tell a client we can get their abandonment rate to zero, and no honest agency will promise you a specific percentage improvement either. Every store’s traffic mix, price point, and audience are different, and results vary accordingly. What we can say with confidence is that fixing the friction points above — late costs, forced accounts, excessive form fields, weak mobile performance — consistently moves stores in the right direction. How far depends on where you’re starting from.
Quick Answers
Q: What’s a “good” cart abandonment rate?
A: Anything meaningfully below the roughly 70% industry average is a good sign, but the right benchmark depends on your industry and price point. Track your own trend over time rather than chasing a universal number.
Q: Do I need a developer to fix checkout issues?
A: Some fixes (like enabling guest checkout or reordering form fields) are configuration changes in most platforms. Others, like custom shipping-cost display logic or performance fixes, benefit from developer involvement. Start with the free, low-effort changes and escalate from there.
Q: How often should I re-test my checkout flow?
A: At minimum, whenever you change payment providers, redesign a page, or notice a shift in your abandonment data. A quarterly review is a reasonable habit for most small and mid-sized stores.
Written by the team at Technowave Global Solutions, a web design, development, and SEO agency based in Ludhiana, India, working with clients since 2010. Last updated July 2026.