Why shoppers abandon carts, and which reasons you can fix

Separate the recoverable from the normal

Baymard Institute’s aggregate of published studies puts the documented average abandonment rate at about 70%, and in its own survey 42% of US shoppers who abandoned said they were just browsing. Shoppers add three things to compare them, or park an item to think about it, and leave with no intention of buying today. No change you make will convert most of that, and chasing it wastes effort.

What is left is the recoverable portion: sessions where the shopper intended to buy and something specific stopped them. That is what to measure, and the way to see it is to look at what changed on screen immediately before the exit rather than at the total.

Cost that appears later than expected

Extra cost at checkout is the most frequently cited reason in Baymard’s survey, at 40% of shoppers who gave a reason other than browsing. It is also the cheapest to address, because it is usually a content problem rather than a pricing one.

The fix is rarely to reduce the cost. It is to move the moment the shopper learns about it: shipping cost or the free-shipping threshold stated on the product page and in the cart, so the number at checkout confirms an expectation instead of creating one.

The signature is a shopper who reaches the cart, sees a total higher than the sum of the items, and goes back to the product page or leaves within seconds.

Forced account creation

Requiring an account before purchase adds a task that has nothing to do with what the shopper came for. Guest checkout, with an optional account offered afterwards, captures the same customers without the toll.

Check this rather than assuming it. Plenty of stores believe they offer guest checkout and have it switched off by a setting or an app.

A checkout that asks for too much

Every field is a chance to reconsider. Company name, a second address line, a phone number when nobody will ever call it: each is small, and together they change the step from confirming to filling in a form.

The honest test is whether a field changes what your operation does. If nobody reads it, it should not be there.

A missing payment method

Shoppers have a default way of paying, and its absence is a hard stop rather than a friction. Wallet payments such as Shop Pay and Apple Pay remove typing on phones, which is where most of the abandonment lives.

This is easy to check and easy to leave stale: payment method availability changes over time and by market, and nobody re-tests it.

Slow or broken steps

A cart drawer that is slow to open produces repeated taps and then an exit. A discount field that rejects a valid code with no explanation ends the session at once.

These are the failures worth finding first, because they are unambiguous and cheap. A control that does nothing when tapped is not a design opinion. It is a defect with a monthly cost.

What to do first

Work in cost order rather than in the order the list is written. Broken and dead controls first, because they are cheap and certain. Then cost surprise, because it is the most-cited cause and a content change. Then the checkout field audit and payment methods.

Only after that is it worth testing anything subtler. A store with a dead discount field and hidden shipping does not have a copy problem.

What Liftable checks here

The free scan looks for several of these from outside: shipping cost first shown at checkout, a free-shipping threshold the cart never mentions, an open discount field, express checkout missing or below the fold on the mobile cart, a slow cart drawer and no trust line at the cart. Each is shown on your own pages with its evidence, and the scan prints no dollar figure.

Some of the fixes are ones Liftable can draft for you to read and approve: a trust or delivery line shown through its theme app extension, or a shipping test run as a Shopify Function. A shipping test has run on our own development store; no test has run on a merchant’s store yet. Our founding-team programme implements and measures the first fix with you.

Sources

1. Baymard Institute: cart abandonment rate statistics. Aggregates published studies to a documented average cart abandonment rate of about 70% (70.22% across 50 studies). In its own survey of US online shoppers, 42% said they abandoned because they were just browsing; of the remaining reasons, extra costs at checkout led at 40%.
2. Liftable: what is built today. Liftable’s own account of what the product does, checked against the code on 2 October 2026 and shown on /how-it-works and /compare. Every figure this page gives about Liftable comes from it. No test has run on a merchant’s store and there are no published merchant results yet.

Questions