Around 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned. That average is quoted everywhere and helps nobody — because it mixes unfixable behavior (browsers, price-checkers) with entirely fixable store problems. Your job isn't to reach 0%. It's to stop losing the buyers who wanted to buy.

Here are the seven fixable causes, in the order we usually find them.

1. Shipping cost appears too late

The #1 stated reason for abandonment in every study since forever: unexpected costs at checkout. If a shopper first learns your shipping price after entering their email and address, a chunk of them punish the surprise by leaving.

Fix: show shipping cost (or the free-shipping threshold) in the cart itself, and ideally on product pages ("Free shipping over $50"). No surprises inside checkout.

2. The empty coupon box

An empty "discount code" field is an instruction: other people are paying less than you. Shoppers leave to hunt codes on Google; many never come back — or come back through an affiliate coupon site that takes a cut of a sale you already had.

Fix: if you rarely run codes, de-emphasize the field (Shopify checkout allows this styling-wise) or use automatic discounts instead of codes wherever possible.

3. Forced account creation

"Create an account to continue" converts a purchase decision into a relationship decision. Guests buy; some later become accounts. Never gate the money.

4. A slow or janky path to checkout

Every second between "Add to Cart" and a loaded checkout sheds buyers. We've measured stores with multi-second redirect chains on the cart itself — a toll booth at the exact moment of highest intent. Test yours on a phone, on mobile data, and time it honestly.

5. Missing express payments

Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay turn checkout into a thumbprint. For mobile-heavy stores, express options routinely lift completed checkouts — the form-typing you're skipping is exactly where mobile buyers give up.

6. Trust wobble at the last step

Buyers get cold feet at the payment screen. What settles them: visible returns policy, a real business address in the footer, consistent branding through checkout, and reviews they saw earlier still echoing in their memory. What spooks them: a checkout that suddenly looks different from the store, or policies they can't find.

7. No (or lazy) recovery flow

Some abandonment is inevitable — which is why recovery emails exist. The bar in 2026:

  • Email 1, ~1 hour after: "forgot something?" with the cart contents pictured. No discount yet — many just got distracted and will complete at full price.
  • Email 2, ~24 hours: answer objections — shipping, returns, reviews.
  • Email 3, ~72 hours: if discounting at all, this is the only place. Habitual immediate discounts train your audience to abandon on purpose.

If you run Klaviyo or Shopify Email and only have a single default recovery email, this sequence is an afternoon of work with measurable payback.

Finding YOUR biggest leak

The causes above have very different price tags per store. The way to know yours: walk your own funnel on a phone like a stranger — or measure it properly.

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Not sure which of these is hurting YOUR store? We built a free tool that checks all of it automatically — it crawls your store the way a real shopper does (on a phone, from first visit to checkout) and sends you a report naming your actual products and pages, in about 15 minutes. [Get your free store audit →](/free-audit)

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Recovering even a tenth of abandoned carts is often worth more than any traffic campaign you could run this month — and it costs you exactly nothing in ad spend.