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An abandoned cart is a nearly completed order that stops one step before payment. It happens to every online store, but understanding why the customer stopped right there makes it possible to take action: first by reducing the number of abandonments with a simpler and more transparent checkout, then by recovering some of the already lost sales with targeted contact. On this page we look at the most common causes, how to measure the phenomenon, and what to do, before and after abandonment.
We know it well. For anyone running an online store, it's one of the most frustrating signals, because the sale was close and was lost one step before the end. Understanding why it happens, and what to do before and after it occurs, is one of the most direct ways to increase revenue without bringing a single extra visitor to the site.
What cart abandonment is
We talk about cart abandonment when a visitor adds one or more products to the cart, enters the checkout process, and then leaves the site without paying. It's different from someone who browses the catalog without ever reaching the cart: here the intention to buy was there, and it was concrete. This is why cart abandonment is such an important indicator: it measures the sales the store almost made and didn't, not generic traffic that was never really interested.
The phenomenon affects every ecommerce, from large marketplaces to the smallest stores. The aggregate figure varies a lot depending on the sector, the device used (on mobile, abandonment is typically higher than on desktop) and the type of product sold, so comparing your own store to a generic average doesn't make much sense. What matters is measuring your own rate, understanding its main causes, and working to reduce it over time.
Why customers stop before paying
The causes of abandonment are almost never a mystery: in most cases they are concrete obstacles that appear right in the final steps, when the customer expected to be almost done. The most common are:
Costs that appear only at the end. Shipping, taxes or fees shown only in the last step, after the customer has already compared the initial price with other stores, are one of the most cited causes of abandonment: it feels like a "hidden" price.
Mandatory account creation. Requiring a full registration before being able to pay, when the customer just wants to complete the purchase, lengthens checkout and adds one more reason to postpone or give up.
Checkout that's too long or unclear. Too many fields to fill in, unnecessary steps or a path that doesn't make it clear where you are, pushes people to interrupt the purchase, especially on mobile.
Insufficient payment methods. If the method the customer normally uses is missing — card, bank transfer, digital wallets or installment payment depending on the audience — the purchase stops there.
Unclear or too long delivery times. Anyone who needs the product within a certain time frame abandons if they don't find a clear indication of when the order will arrive.
Low perceived trust in the site. The absence of elements that convey reliability, real contacts, clear return policies, a site that looks well cared for, weighs especially on a first purchase from a new store.
Slow site or payment errors. A checkout that freezes, returns an error or takes too long to load loses the order regardless of price and product: here the problem isn't commercial but technical.
Almost always, abandonment in a single store stems from two or three of these causes together, not just one. That's why the first useful step isn't guessing, but looking at your own checkout data.
In fact, just this past month we built a module for sites built with prestashop designed specifically to optimize the checkout page, since the standard prestashop one has a monstrous abandonment rate!
How to measure cart abandonment
The abandonment rate is calculated by comparing how many carts were created (or how many checkouts were started) in a period with how many orders were actually completed in the same period. Most ecommerce CMS already show this figure in the orders panel, often distinguishing "pending" or "not completed" orders from paid ones; alternatively, it can be read from a site analytics tool, following the path from cart to confirmed payment.
More useful than the absolute number is understanding where the path breaks off: if most abandonments happen right when reaching the total with shipping costs, the problem is likely the cost shown too late. If instead abandonment is concentrated on the actual payment page, the main suspect is technical (slowness, error, missing method) or trust-related. Tracking this figure over time, not as an isolated snapshot but as a trend over weeks or months, is what allows you to understand if an intervention is working.
How to reduce abandonment before it happens
The intervention with the highest return is almost always reducing the causes of abandonment for all future customers, not just recovering those who have already left. Some measures that have a direct impact:
Show total costs as early as possible, ideally already on the cart page, not just at the last step.
Offer guest checkout, leaving account creation as an optional choice rather than a mandatory step.
Reduce checkout fields to only those truly necessary to complete the order and ship it.
Include the payment methods most used by your audience, not just the one that's most convenient for the store to set up.
State realistic delivery times already during product selection, not only after the order is placed.
Check that checkout is fast and reliable, paying particular attention to how it behaves on smartphones, where most ecommerce traffic comes from today.
None of these measures require lowering prices: they act on the purchase experience, not on the margin.
How to recover carts that have already been abandoned
Even with an optimized checkout, some carts will still be abandoned: some customers were just comparing prices, others were interrupted by something external to the site. This is where recovery comes in, which serves to bring back those who were close to buying, not to convince those who never really intended to.
The most common tool is the cart recovery email: a message sent within a few hours of abandonment, which precisely reminds the customer of the products left in the cart and, when possible, resolves the most likely obstacle (for example by clarifying shipping times or pointing out limited availability). For this to be feasible, however, the customer must have left an email with consent to be contacted again: without this step, in line with GDPR, email recovery cannot be done. Some stores also use advertising retargeting, i.e. showing targeted ads to those who visited the site without completing the purchase, which has its own consent rules (cookies and tracking) that must be respected in the same way.
Common mistakes in recovery
Cart recovery works best when it's targeted, not when it's automatic and the same for everyone. The most frequent mistakes:
Insisting too much. More than two or three contacts for the same abandoned cart tends to annoy rather than convince.
Offering a discount right away. An automatic discount on every abandonment teaches regular customers to abandon on purpose, waiting for the offer, and erodes the margin on purchases that would have happened anyway.
Ignoring the likely reason for abandonment. A generic email ("you forgot something in your cart") converts less than a message that addresses the most plausible obstacle for that type of order.
Not respecting the consent collected. Contacting those who have not given explicit consent, or continuing to do so after a deletion request, is a compliance issue as well as a reputational one.
How KeideaCMS helps manage checkout
KeideaCMS includes an orders panel that distinguishes completed orders from carts that were started but not finished, so you can see how many there are and which products they stall on most often, without having to add a separate plugin to do so. Checkout is part of the platform and is updated along with the rest of the site, with technical support included in the fee: if a technical issue is causing lost orders at the payment stage, reporting and fixing it goes through the same team that manages the site, without having to coordinate developer, hosting and third-party plugins separately.
If you want to understand where your checkout is losing orders today, tell us about it through the contact form: we'll look at your orders panel together and tell you which measures are most likely to bring those sales back.
