Why 70% of Shoppers Abandon Their Cart, and How to Win Them Back
Your best-performing marketing channel might be your checkout. For most online retailers, the biggest pool of recoverable revenue isn’t hiding in an untapped ad platform — it’s sitting in the carts people fill and then walk away from.
The scale of it is hard to overstate. Across 50 separate studies, the average documented cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. More than seven in ten shoppers who add something to their basket leave without buying. These aren’t cold visitors who bounced off a product page — they are people who chose an item, committed enough to add it, and then changed their mind at the last step. That makes the checkout the single most expensive place on your website to lose people.
And it gets worse on the device most of your customers actually use. Mobile cart abandonment runs at around 80%, against roughly 66% on desktop, with tablets in between. Given that mobile now accounts for the lion’s share of ecommerce traffic, the screen most people shop on is also the one that converts worst. That single gap is where a lot of D2C growth quietly disappears.
This is friction, not indecision
It is tempting to write abandonment off as window-shopping. The data says otherwise. Baymard Institute estimates that around £197 billion in lost orders across the US and EU is recoverable purely through better checkout design — not better products, not more traffic, just a smoother path to pay. The reasons people give are specific and fixable.
The single biggest culprit is cost surprise. Nearly half of shoppers — 48% — abandon because shipping, taxes or other fees pushed the total higher than they expected at the final step. The damage isn’t really the cost; it’s the surprise. A customer who sees £5.99 shipping on the product page accepts it. The same customer who only discovers it on the payment screen feels misled, and leaves.
Security worries come next: roughly one in five shoppers abandoned a purchase in the last quarter because they didn’t trust the site with their details. Then there’s forced account creation, clumsy mobile forms, and slow or limited payment options. None of these are deep product problems. They are interface problems — which means they are exactly the kind of thing optimisation fixes.
Show every cost early
If only one thing changes, make it this: surface the full price as early as possible. Put shipping thresholds on the product page, show a running total in the cart, and never let a fee appear for the first time on the payment screen. “Free shipping over £50” stated up front does more for conversion than a discount revealed too late. The goal is simple — the number a customer sees at checkout should be the number they already had in their head.
Treat mobile as the main event
With most traffic and the worst conversion sitting on mobile, a checkout that merely “works” on a phone isn’t enough. The wins are concrete: large tap targets, numeric keypads for card and postcode fields, autofill that actually works, and one-tap wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay. Those wallets are a big reason mobile and desktop conversion are now converging toward parity at roughly 2.8% each — they remove the most painful part of mobile buying, which is typing card details on a small screen.
Earn trust at the moment of payment
Trust has to peak exactly where doubt does — the payment step. Recognisable payment logos, a visible returns policy, and third-party security signals placed next to the pay button reassure people at the precise moment they hesitate. It is a small design decision with an outsized commercial effect.
Don’t force the account
Requiring an account before purchase is one of the most reliable ways to lose a sale. Offer guest checkout, and invite account creation after the order is placed, when the customer is already happy and the friction costs you nothing. You still capture the email; you just stop putting a wall in front of the money.
What this is actually worth
The maths is the part worth sitting with. The average store converts somewhere around 2.7%. A retailer that lifts conversion from 2% to 3% has grown sales by half — without spending another penny on traffic. Recovering even a slice of a 70% abandonment rate is the rare growth lever that pays back immediately and keeps paying. You’ve already bought these customers. The work now is simply not to lose them at the till.
At Cargill Digital we treat the checkout as the highest-value real estate on an ecommerce site, because it is. If your abandonment rate is sitting near the average, there is measurable revenue waiting to be recovered — and a structured audit is how you find it.