E-commerce and payments
What is Checkout abandonment?
Checkout abandonment is a customer starting a purchase and leaving before paying. Published averages cluster around 70 percent, but the useful number is your own drop-off by step — the average tells you nothing about which question lost the sale.
Also called: cart abandonment
The causes that are build problems, not marketing problems
- Cost revealed late — shipping, tax or fees appearing at the final step
- Forced account creation before purchase
- A form that loses entered data on error or rotation
- Payment failure with a generic message and no recovery path
- Slow steps, on the screens where the customer is most committed
Fixes in order of impact
- Show the full cost, including shipping, on the cart page
- Offer guest checkout, and invite account creation after the order
- Correct input types and autocomplete attributes so a phone can fill the form
- Errors shown next to the field, in text, with no layout shift
- A recoverable pending order so a failed payment can be retried rather than restarted
Where abandonment emails belong
After the build problems are fixed. Recovering abandoned carts by email while the checkout is still failing people is paying to send them back into the same wall.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Why checkouts get abandoned, and which fixes belong in the build covers this properly — 2 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.