Cart abandonment is a significant challenge for online businesses, directly affecting conversion rates and revenue.
As of 2024, over 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before purchase, illustrating the disconnect between attracting and converting customers. This widespread issue contributes to an estimated $18 billion in lost sales revenue annually.
While cart abandonment can’t be eliminated, understanding its causes is key to minimizing its impact. We can’t control customers who are digitally window shopping, comparing prices, or even wanting to purchase but have an unexpected financial commitment elsewhere.
However, by identifying common reasons for cart abandonment, you can implement strategies to reduce it and improve your bottom line.
In this article, we’ll explore the most common reasons for cart abandonment and the strategies you can use to address them.
Consider using Primer, a unified payment infrastructure, to decrease your cart abandonment rates. Book a call with our team to learn how we can help your business optimize its payments.
Eight reasons for cart abandonment and what you can do about it
Cart abandonment occurs when a potential customer begins checkout but leaves without completing their purchase. It’s a common hurdle for online businesses, but you can take targeted action to reduce its impact by understanding why it happens
Here are eight common reasons for cart abandonment.
1. The preferred payment method is unavailable.
As more payment options become available, customers increasingly favor specific methods. In the United States, for instance, The Federal Reserve found that 29% of customers preferred debit cards, 28% credit cards, 20% cash, and 11% direct payments. That leaves 12% for alternative payment methods, like digital wallets and Buy Now, Pay Later.
Of course, these figures vary drastically depending on where your business operates. For instance, 35% of online purchases are paid via cash on delivery in Thailand, while just 25% are paid by card. This stark contrast shows the importance of offering payment methods that resonate with your target market, and for international businesses, this is unlikely to be the same across different markets.
Customers who find their preferred payment method unavailable are more likely to abandon their purchase. A Baymard Study found that 13% of online shoppers will abandon their cart if their payment method of choice isn’t available.
What you can do
You should consider adding multiple payment methods to your checkout to minimize cart abandonment because a consumer’s preferred payment method is unavailable. However, be cautious—not all customers respond well to an overwhelming number of choices. Too many options can create decision fatigue, leading to abandonment for a different reason.
Understanding your customers’ preferences and buying habits is the key to striking the right balance. Analyze your data to identify your target market's most commonly used payment methods. This insight will help you prioritize payment options that resonate with your audience.
Learn more about the evolution of alternative payment methods.
Unexpected shipping costs or limited options
How many times have you abandoned a cart after discovering unexpected shipping fees? If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Customers frequently abandon their purchases when additional charges are revealed late in the checkout process.
Our study on ecommerce businesses found that 46% of UK consumers get frustrated with expensive delivery costs at the checkout, leading to cart abandonment.
Similarly, a lack of preferred shipping options also drives customers away. Consumers expect flexibility and convenience in today’s fast-paced world of same-day delivery and will likely seek alternatives elsewhere when their preferred shipping method isn’t available.
What you can do
To minimize cart abandonment caused by unexpected shipping costs or limited delivery options, consider the following strategies:
- Be transparent about shipping costs: Display delivery fees early in the shopping process, such as on product pages or in the cart summary. Transparency builds trust and prevents unpleasant surprises.
- Offer free shipping or discounts: Free shipping remains one of the most compelling incentives for online shoppers. If free shipping isn’t feasible, consider offering coupon codes to reduce delivery costs.
- Expand shipping options: Various delivery options cater to different preferences and needs. These could include: Multiple courier choices, weekend delivery, in-store pickups, time slots for delivery, and next-day delivery.
False declines
A false decline occurs when a legitimate customer payment is incorrectly declined due to suspected fraud or a failure in the payment value chain. This serious issue is hiding in plain sight, with 42% of consumers saying they'll abandon their cart after being declined.
False declines don’t just lead to immediate cart abandonment—they can harm your business in the long term. They negatively affect customer loyalty, reduce lifetime value, and may even damage your reputation.
What you can do
To reduce false declines and their impact on cart abandonment, consider implementing these strategies:
- Use Fallbacks to retry the payment with an alternative processor
- Utilize 3DS to give issuers more confidence when authorizing the transaction
- Optimize risk rules to avoid rejecting legitimate transactions
- Send additional data with the payment to give confidence to the issuing bank
- Route to the processor with the best performance based on market, card type, etc.
Learn more about false declines and improving authorization rates.
Inconsistent checkout experience
A seamless checkout experience is crucial for reducing cart abandonment. If your checkout page doesn’t match your website’s look and feel, customers may question its legitimacy and abandon their purchase.
Consistency is also critical across devices. For instance, a customer might begin a purchase on their laptop but switch to their mobile device to complete it later. The issue is that mobile cart abandonment sits at 85%, meaning a clunk and inconsistent experience will likely lead to cart abandonment,
What you can do
To create a consistent and trustworthy checkout experience, consider the following strategies:
- Ensure your checkout pages are designed to look and feel like the rest of your website—that includes everything from brand colors and fonts to the tone of voice used on the page.
- Optimize the checkout experience on different browsers and devices.
- Tailor payment methods by device and customer location. For example, Google Pay or Apple Pay can be offered to mobile users while prioritizing card payments on desktops.
Having to create a new user account
Requiring customers to sign up for an account can often create buyer friction, deterring them from completing their purchase. Our recent study found that around 27% of customers abandon their carts for this reason.
What you can do
To reduce cart abandonment, consider offering a guest checkout option. This allows customers to buy without an account and reduces the steps required to complete a purchase.
Payment security concerns
Customers are more vigilant about protecting their personal and financial information online. Suboptimal payment security and data privacy practices cause around 17% of customers to abandon their carts.
What you can do
To reduce cart abandonment due to security concerns, you should ensure your website is:
- SSL-secured
- PCI-compliant
- Verified by trusted third-party security companies
You should also offer customers a familiar and trusted payment option. This should be something they feel comfortable using and are familiar with.
Long and confusing checkout
A long and confusing checkout frustrates customers, accounting for 15% of all abandoned carts. Whether your site experiences issues like slow load speed or presents a challenge with a multi-page checkout, these issues will likely impact your cart abandonment rate.
What you can do
Streamline the time and effort required to complete a purchase, leaving shoppers with fewer opportunities to abandon their digital cart. Implement a single-page checkout to reduce buyer friction and reduce the number of web pages needed to complete a transaction.
By reducing the number of assets to load, servers require fewer resources to maintain and support software. This simple act reduces page loading time and improves the overall user experience.
Lack of customer support
Lacking an option for customer support also increases cart abandonment. Some customers abandon their carts if they can’t find the help they need, so creating informational articles on your website is essential when support is unavailable.
What you can do
Offering live chat support effectively reduces cart abandonment, allowing customers to get instant answers to their questions without leaving the checkout page.
How to prevent shopping cart abandonment
While cart abandonment will always be a problem, you can minimize your cart abandonment rate with a few simple and proactive changes.
Analyze user behavior for conversion funnel leaks.
Learning where your customers are abandoning their carts is essential for preventing cart abandonment. Existing tools like Google’s Advanced E-commerce Analytics can help you create comprehensive conversion funnels to map where shoppers drop off in the conversion funnel.
Funnel Visualization Reports can outline your customer journey, enabling you to see which pages are visited and what proportion of shoppers remain in each funnel stage. For example, high attrition on the payment page could indicate unclear CTAs, too few payment options, or poor site functionality.
We take a deeper dive into payment analytics in this article
Optimize payments processing
With lengthy and complicated checkout processes being a significant reason for cart abandonment, payment optimization is essential for reducing your cart abandonment rate. By improving your payments strategy and technology stack, you can enhance authorization rates, minimize fraud, and ultimately, provide a seamless customer experience that doesn’t involve cart abandonment.
It's essential to evaluate your customer data to determine what is causing cart abandonment in your business. Then, you can choose the improvements that would be more appropriate for targeting those issues. These could include anything from rearranging payment methods at checkout to integrating new processors or using machine learning in your fraud tools.
Learn more about payment optimization.
Choose the features you need
It’s easy to get carried away and add all the features you think will benefit your users. However, doing so might overcomplicate the shopping process, confuse the customer, and increase cart abandonment.
To avoid this, you should carefully consider the consumer buying journey. Ask yourself whether each buyer step adds value to your customer’s shopping experience. For instance, a feature that allows customers to compare products might be helpful in an electronics store but not so much for customized posters.
To reduce the chances of cart abandonment, choose only the features you need and keep your online store simple and user-friendly.
Collect customer feedback about pain points
Customer feedback is always valuable for identifying underlying issues that might lead to cart abandonment. We’ve already mentioned how tools like Google’s Advanced E-commerce Analytics can help businesses visualize common customer dropoff points - but quantitative data can only go so far.
Qualitative data collection from post-purchase surveys can:
- Outline a user’s feelings about the checkout process
- Explore UX/UI upgrades
- Recommend future products
- Highlight any problems during the checkout process
The insights gained during these surveys can help you identify areas for improvement and build trust with your customers. If you notice high attrition levels after a specific step, these surveys will provide further insight into why.
Offer relevant payment methods
Providing multiple payment methods is essential to ensure customers can use their preferred option. However, offering too many choices can be just as detrimental as providing too few. A “wall of options” can overwhelm customers, making it harder for them to decide and potentially leading to cart abandonment.
To strike the right balance, merchants must understand their audience and tailor their payment offerings to meet customer preferences. This is especially important for businesses operating in multiple regions, as payment preferences can vary widely across markets.
Conduct A/B testing
A/B testing is a powerful method for optimizing your website and reducing cart abandonment rates. By experimenting with different elements of your checkout process, you can identify what resonates most with your audience and drive better results.
You run an A/B test by creating two web page versions based on the goals you want to test. The next step is to divide your web traffic among the versions and monitor each version's performance to determine which best meets those goals.
When running A/B tests, altering only one variable at a time is essential. This allows you to accurately determine which changes lead to increased or decreased outcomes and optimize the customer journey.
Read on for the latest data on cart abandonment from our recent e-commerce study spanning 2,000 consumers and 500 retail businesses.
How to use Primer to reduce cart abandonments
Primer is a unified payments infrastructure that enables businesses to accept, optimize, and manage online payments. With a single API integration, you can connect to multiple payment services and tools, simplifying your payment stack and eliminating technical complexities.
By streamlining integrations and operations, Primer enables your business to scale faster, seize new growth opportunities, and overcome the resource constraints of traditional payment technologies.
Here are three ways Primer helps reduce cart abandonment:
1. Add local and global payment methods with Universal Checkout
Around 13% of online shoppers abandon their carts when they can’t find their preferred payment method. The solution isn’t to add every payment option but to focus on what your customers want. For instance, iDEAL dominates in the Netherlands, while Giropay is a must-have in Germany.
With Primer, you can add multiple payment methods directly through the platform, eliminating the need for complex integrations or coding.
Once you’ve added these methods, Universal Checkout gives you full control over how they are presented to your customers. Using metadata and custom rules, you can dynamically display the most relevant payment options based on factors like region, customer preferences, or transaction type. This ensures a smoother checkout experience that aligns with your business needs.
If you need even more customization, Primer’s headless option lets you design a bespoke checkout experience that matches your brand.
For businesses that want even greater flexibility, Primer’s headless option lets you build fully customized checkout experiences tailored to your brand.
Whether you need to roll out new payment options quickly or adapt your checkout flow for specific regions, Universal Checkout helps you to meet customer expectations without overwhelming your team.
Universal Checkout in action
Ferryhopper, an online ferry ticketing platform, faced high cart abandonment rates due to limited localized payment methods. By adopting Primer’s Universal Checkout, they:
- Added global and local payment methods without writing a single line of code.
- Customized checkout flows to meet regional expectations, boosting customer confidence.
- Reduced cart abandonment by creating a seamless, intuitive payment experience.
Read more: Charting a new course for payments at Ferryhopper
2. Recover lost conversions with Fallbacks
Cart abandonment often results from failed payments, not just customer hesitation. Primer’s Fallbacks feature addresses this by ensuring transactions don’t stop at the first sign of trouble. When a recoverable (soft decline) payment fails with the primary processor, Primer instantly reroutes it to a secondary processor, recovering lost revenue and creating a smoother customer experience.
Fallbacks also minimize customer friction, as 3DS data from the original transaction is reused, eliminating the need for repeated authentication and customer frustration.
Setting up Fallbacks is easy, and can be done on our platform without needing any code.
Fallbacks in action: Banxa
Banxa, a leading crypto infrastructure provider, faced challenges optimizing payments and addressing declines. By leveraging Fallbacks and dynamic processor testing, Banxa achieved significant results:
- Recovered over USD $7 million in revenue during the first half of 2024 by implementing Primer’s Fallback functionality.
- A/B tested processors to optimize approval rates and improve overall payment performance.
- Delivered a smoother, more reliable checkout experience, reducing customer frustration and increasing conversions.
Read more: Banxa deploys Primer to break down barriers to crypto adoption
3. Use Primer 3DS to reduce checkout friction and increase conversions
Imagine a customer finalizing their purchase only to face a 3DS challenge on a low-risk transaction. Frustrated, they may abandon their cart and take their business elsewhere.
The key to preventing this is to adapt 3DS logic to reduce friction where regulations allow it. This is resource intensive—even more so when you have to manage 3DS across multiple processors. Each provider requires separate configurations, and any updates need to be replicated across all systems, draining technical resources and increasing the risk of errors.
Primer 3DS eliminates these challenges. From a single dashboard, businesses can customize when and how 3DS is triggered across all processors for frictionless transactions. If a recoverable transaction (soft decline) fails, Primer can re-use the original 3DS data for the Fallback processor, so the customer doesn’t need to authenticate again.
By simplifying 3DS management and reducing unnecessary friction, Primer can help you boost conversions, improve checkout experiences, and minimize cart abandonment.
Learn more about 3DS:
- Why it’s time to revisit your 3D Secure strategy
- Key questions to ask when building an optimal 3DS strategy
Use Primer to help reduce your cart abandonment rates
There is plenty to consider when evaluating the reasons for cart abandonment in your business. However, finding the core issues specific to your company and implementing effective strategies that address them can significantly increase conversion, boost sales, and improve your bottom line.
Offering multiple payment methods, simplifying the checkout process, and making customer-first decisions are just a few ways a business can address cart abandonment.
With Primer, optimizing your payment stack to reduce cart abandonments is simple. To get started, book a call with one of our experts.
FAQs
How does cart abandonment change between desktop and mobile?
Cart abandonment rates can vary significantly between desktop and mobile devices. Cart abandonment rates are generally higher on mobile devices due to UX/UI issues and functionality. Mobile devices present new challenges for web designers, and web visitors often experience slower loading times and sizing issues when a site isn’t optimized for mobile.
How do you deal with abandoned carts?
Dealing with abandoned carts involves time-intensive strategies, including streamlining checkout, cost transparency, offering multiple payment methods, and mobile responsiveness.
Businesses can also implement re-engagement strategies such as cart abandonment emails and retargeting ads to ensure customers return to the site and complete their purchases.
Should customers experience technical issues while going through the checkout process, offering real-time customer support could also reduce the likelihood of cart abandonment.
What is the average cart abandonment rate?
According to the Baymard Institute, the average shopping cart abandonment rate worldwide is approximately 70.19%.
