Abandonment rates around 70% are normal across e-commerce. Some of that is browsing behaviour you cannot recover. A meaningful share is friction you introduced.
Discounting treats the symptom and trains customers to wait for the code.
1. Unexpected shipping cost
Consistently the most cited reason for abandoning a cart. The problem is not the amount — it is that it appeared at step three.
Fix: show shipping cost, or a threshold for free shipping, on the product page. A customer who sees $8 shipping early either accepts it or leaves before investing effort. Either outcome beats a surprise at checkout.
2. Forced account creation
Requiring registration before purchase asks the customer to commit to a relationship before they have bought anything.
Fix: guest checkout, always. Offer account creation after the order is placed, when they already have a reason to want order tracking.
3. Too many fields
Every additional field loses people. Company name, second address line, phone number, "how did you hear about us" — each one is a small tax on completion.
Fix: ask only for what you need to fulfil and contact. Use address autocomplete. Combine first and last name into one field unless you have a genuine reason not to. Test on a phone, which is where most abandonment happens.
4. Missing trust signals
A stranger is about to give you card details. What reassures them is boring and specific: a real contact address, a plainly stated returns policy, visible payment logos, and reviews that read like people wrote them.
Fix: put the returns policy where the decision happens — on the product page and in the cart, not only in a footer link.
5. Their payment method is absent
Preferences vary sharply by market. Card is universal; Apple Pay and Google Pay materially lift mobile conversion; some markets expect local methods.
Fix: enable the wallets at minimum. They also remove the form-filling problem entirely, which fixes reason three for those customers.
6. The checkout is slow
A checkout that takes four seconds to respond on a phone on mobile data loses people who had decided to buy. This is where app stacks charge their real price — see what a Shopify store costs.
Fix: measure the checkout on a mid-range phone on a throttled connection, not on your laptop. Remove scripts that do not earn their place.
Recovery emails, done properly
Abandoned cart email remains the highest-return automation in e-commerce. Structure that works:
- 1 hour — a reminder. No discount. Often they were simply interrupted.
- 24 hours — restate the value, address the likely objection, include reviews.
- 72 hours — an incentive, if you use one at all.
Leading with a discount in the first email converts people who would have bought anyway at full price. Let the reminder do its work first.
Measure before you change
Set up funnel tracking so you know which step loses people. Fixing shipping display when your actual drop-off is at payment wastes the effort.
Most stores have one dominant leak. Find it, fix it, measure again, then look for the next one.