Cart abandonment: how to bring the rate down

Comparison table

The facts in one place first. Figures as of July 2026.

How many carts actually fall over

Here is the number that stings: around 70 percent of carts end without a completed purchase. The Baymard Institute aggregates this from fifty studies and the latest update, from September 2025, puts it at exactly 70.22 percent. Worse, that figure has hovered around seventy percent for a full decade, so no miracle trend is going to knock it down on its own.

It does not follow that seven in ten customers left because you got something wrong. A large share of people, around 43 percent, are browsing, comparing and saving for later, and you will not push those into a purchase. The interesting part is the remaining percentage, because that is where the fixable reasons live.

Why people walk away from a cart

Baymard asked people directly and the order of the answers is instructive. Extra costs revealed only at the cart lead comfortably, meaning shipping, taxes and fees the customer did not expect (39 percent). Then slow delivery (21 percent), distrust when entering card details (19 percent) and forced account creation (19 percent). Further down come a long and complicated checkout, a poor returns policy, site errors and too few payment methods.

Notice that most of those reasons are not about money. They are about surprise and friction. The customer has decided to buy, reaches the cart and something ambushes or delays them. A shipping cost they only saw at the end. An account they never wanted. A form with fifteen fields. These are the things you fix without giving up a point of margin.

What genuinely moves the number

Start with transparency. The total price including shipping belongs in front of the customer as early as possible, ideally on the product page or immediately in the cart, not in the final step. If you offer free shipping above a threshold, say so loudly, because it raises average order value at the same time.

The second lever is a checkout without friction. Allow purchase without registration, shorten the form, and offer the payment methods your market actually uses. That list is genuinely local: card and instant bank transfer travel everywhere, deferred payment is spreading fast, and cash on delivery still carries a serious share of orders across Central Europe while meaning almost nothing to a British or American shopper. Pick for the market you sell into rather than the one you read about.

Then watch your speed. Every extra second on mobile costs around 12 percent of conversion, and past three seconds of loading the bounce rate climbs towards fifty percent. Mobile is the majority of visits today, which makes this the single biggest opportunity on the list.

Baymard calculated that better checkout design alone can win a large store up to 35 percent higher conversion. That is not shaving a second off a page. That is a different league of revenue from the same traffic.

The reminder, and a smarter offer for someone coming back

Even after the best checkout, some people will leave. This is where the recovery email comes in, the automatic abandoned cart reminder. It is not about pestering anyone. Often the customer simply walked away from the computer and is grateful to come back when the link is to hand.

Why aim at the returning visitor in particular? Because the numbers are blunt about it. A returning customer converts at around 4.5 to 6 percent, while a first visit converts at 1 to 2 percent. Retention is a cheaper route to revenue than paying over and over for new people who mostly will not buy anyway. Somebody landing on the same product for the third time is gold from that point of view.

You can also work smarter than a blanket discount. A returning visitor who has come back to a product three times and still has not bought is a different case from a passer by. Blanketing everyone in discount is expensive and it eats your margin. Aiming it at the person who has demonstrated intent and is hesitating makes far more sense. That is exactly what smart offers in Behio are for, and we cover them in a separate article: the discount appears only to a returning visitor based on their behaviour, and it is tied to that person, so nobody can pass it on.

You only find the leak in the data

Without measurement you are treating the patient blind. You need to see the purchase funnel: how many people went from viewing a product to the cart, how many from the cart into checkout, and how many finished. Only when you know which two steps people are falling between do you know what to fix.

In Behio that funnel comes from the built in analytics, including the drop off between individual steps, and it measures every visitor rather than only the ones who accepted cookies. The order detail also shows you the customer's whole path to the purchase. In my view this is the groundwork most stores skip: they chase discounts and advertising while having no idea that half their people are falling at one specific checkout step that could be fixed in an afternoon.

The verdict

Common questions