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Imagine a shop where people pick up a full basket, carry it all the way to the till, look at the cashier, put the basket down and walk out without a word. Offline you’d call it a mystery. Online it happens every day and it has a boring name: cart abandonment. The shopper liked your product enough to choose it. Something between “Add to cart” and “Place order” changed their mind, and your job is to find out what.
Why shoppers bail at the very last step
Some abandonment is completely normal. People use the cart as a wishlist, compare prices in five tabs, or get pulled away because the bus has arrived or the pasta is boiling over. You will never win all of those back, and you don’t need to. But plenty of abandoned carts are caused by the store itself, and that part is very fixable. The reasons are surprisingly consistent from shop to shop: costs that appear only at the end, a checkout that feels like filling in paperwork, a forced registration, too few ways to pay and a quiet doubt about whether this shop is even real.
To find your leak, set up the ecommerce funnel in GA4: product view, add to cart, begin checkout, shipping details, payment details, purchase. The step with the biggest drop is where you start. Then run the cheapest usability test ever invented: ask a friend who has never seen your store to buy something on their phone while you watch in silence. No hints, no “oh, just scroll down”. It will hurt a little. It’s supposed to.
Shipping surprises are cart killers
The most common heartbreak looks like this: the product costs one thing on its page and noticeably more at the final step, once delivery, a cash-on-delivery fee and a mysterious “handling” line appear. Nobody enjoys being ambushed at the till. Show the delivery cost, or at least a starting price and your free delivery threshold, on the product page and in the cart, before anyone has typed a single letter of their address.
Be specific about how the parcel travels: which courier, delivery to an office, a locker or a door, and roughly when it will arrive. If you offer free delivery above a certain amount, put a small progress line in the cart that says how much is left to reach it. That one line turns “ugh, delivery” into “oh, I’ll just add the socks”, which is a much nicer thought for everyone involved. Just make sure the threshold still makes sense for your margin.
Checkout should feel like a receipt, not a tax return
Every extra field is a small hill to climb, and on a phone it’s a steep one. Offer guest checkout and suggest creating an account after the order, when it’s a one-click favour instead of a toll gate. Ask only for what you need to deliver and invoice. Use the right field types so phones show the number keyboard for phone numbers, and proper autocomplete settings so the browser can fill in name and address for the shopper. Show errors next to the field that caused them, in plain words, and never wipe the whole form because one postcode was missing a digit.
Then clear the room. At the payment step, hide the big menu, switch off pop-ups and remove the “you may also like” carousel. And watch the coupon field: a big empty box labelled “Promo code” sends people straight to a search engine to hunt for codes, and some of them never come back. Turn it into a small “Have a code?” link. Finally, offer the ways people actually want to pay: cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay for one-tap checkout, and in Bulgaria cash on delivery, which plenty of shoppers still look for before they trust a new store.
Trust: prove you’re a real shop
A shopper who doesn’t know you yet is asking silent questions at checkout. Is this store real? What if it doesn’t fit? Who do I call if the parcel gets lost? Answer them exactly where the doubt appears. Put a link to your return policy right next to the order button. Show a phone number, a real company name and an address. Display the payment logos people recognise and keep a couple of short reviews visible in the cart.
Write the return policy like a human, not like a contract. Online shoppers in the EU already have a legal right to return most items within 14 days, so say it proudly instead of hiding it in the small print. “Changed your mind? Send it back, we’ll refund you” is reassuring. Four paragraphs of legal fog are not.
Reminder emails that don’t sound desperate
For shoppers who already left an email address, a short abandoned cart sequence is the polite tap on the shoulder. Ask for the email as the very first checkout field, so you have it even if they stop halfway, and make sure your privacy notice covers these reminders. A simple setup works well. The first email goes out within a few hours: product photo, name, price and one button that opens the cart exactly as they left it. The second, a day or so later, answers the likely objection: delivery times, returns, sizing or what other customers say.
A third email with a small incentive is optional, and it should stay optional. If every abandoned cart gets a discount, customers figure it out fast, and you’ve just taught them to leave on purpose and wait for the coupon. Keep the tone light, skip the guilt trip and test the button on a different device than the one you used to fill the cart. Few things are sadder than a reminder that opens an empty cart.
Fix one leak at a time
It’s tempting to change everything at once: new checkout, new payment provider, new emails, new free delivery threshold. Then the numbers move and nobody knows why. Change one thing, give it a few weeks, compare the funnel and keep what worked. Look at the checkout steps once a month, read your reminder emails as if you were the customer, and repeat the friend test whenever the store changes.
If your carts are busier than your order list, write to us with a link to your store. We’ll walk through your checkout like the pickiest first-time customer you’ve ever had and show you exactly where people trip, along with what to fix first.
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