How To Reduce Cart Abandonment
Reducing cart abandonment means ensuring that your shoppers are receiving the best level of user experience possible, and the merchant makes the best sales possible.
Updated May 30, 2025.
Cart abandonment is one of eCommerce’s biggest obstacles. Once you’ve gone through all of the work of getting customers into your store, finding the products that appeal to them, making the decision to buy them, the LAST thing you want to do is for everything to fall at the final hurdle. Making sure that carts aren’t abandoned and sales are followed through is key. Let’s take a look at how this can be achieved.
What Is Cart Abandonment?
Cart abandonment is when shoppers add items to their cart, but don’t complete the sale. Cart abandonment rate shows the percentage of online shoppers who don’t finalize their sale. This is estimated to be at around 70% which is a high figure. This can of course vary based on industry, products and other factors. But either way, it’s clear that cart abandonment is something that should be on all eCommerce store’s minds.
How To Reduce Cart Abandonment
So, now we know what cart abandonment is, it’s clear that we don’t want this to happen to our business. Here are some tips that can help ensure that all of your carts are paid for and followed through.
Offer Incentives
One of the top ways of reducing carat abandonment rates is through having popups that are triggered in those final crucial moments of cart purchase. If a user seems as though they will be leaving the page you can offer some of the following incentives:
A coupon
Discount code
Free gift
Free shipping
If the shoppers make their purchase now, they can gain one of these benefits. If they abandon carts, they will lose these again. This can have a huge positive impact on the amount of people who abandon their carts.
This can work in turning casual browsers into fully fledged customers, and even returning for a second time. This will reduce costs needed to try and bring in new customers, and it will show that your business takes its customers’ satisfaction seriously.
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Streamlining Checkout
One of the main reasons that carts are abandoned is as a result of a complicated checkout process. Once your shopper has already got to the checkout stage, you don’t want to do anything that could lead this to not following through. This means facilitating that you have a streamlined checkout design that is intuitive to use and user friendly.
Here are some tips on how to optimize your checkout:
Optimize load times
Allow guest checkout option
Offer multiple payment options
Multiple payment options can include:
Card
Bank transfer
Apple pay
Paypal
Google pay
Having a ‘store card’ feature can also make it easier for shoppers to make repeat purchases. As we know from Amazon's one click ‘Buy Now’ feature, the less effort it is for the customer to make the purchase, the more likely they are to go through with it.
Look at what payment methods your customers are using the most, and make sure your payment options cater to these well.
Be Up Front
Last minute hidden costs will cause customers to abandon carts. Some fees are expected, such as shipping and service fees. These should be disclosed as soon as possible so customers don’t have any surprises. The sooner they know, the more likely they are to follow through. If these are on the product pages, this is the best, if possible.
If you are advertising discounts or sales on your site, make sure that these are always applied when it comes to checkout. If a customer has reached your store through targeted advertising, if they don’t receive the deal they came for it will have a negative impact. They will not only not make any purchases, but also have a negative impression of your brand moving forwards.
Offer Free Shipping
Something that can always work in order to bring up customer satisfaction and the likelihood of completed sales is offering free shipping. With no extra costs at checkout, shoppers have no reason not to follow through all the way. You can promote this throughout your site, and you can also use it as an incentive. For example, ‘Orders Over $50 Get Free Shipping’. This is a great way to boost AOV.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways that you can reduce cart abandonment rates. The main element of these is ensuring that shoppers have a positive user experience that functions intuitively and without friction. Offering incentives and multiple payment options are a great place to start to ensure that your sales are achieving maximum results.
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