The main causes, in order
1. Unexpected costs. Shipping, taxes, or fees revealed at checkout rather than earlier. Consistently the largest single cause of abandonment. 2. Forced account creation. Requiring registration before purchase. Guest checkout should always be available. 3. Too many steps. Every additional page loses some proportion of buyers. 4. Long forms. Fields that are not strictly required, address forms without autofill, phone numbers demanded without reason. 5. Limited payment options. Missing the wallet or method your market expects. 6. Trust gaps. No visible returns policy, no contact details, no security indicators at the payment step. 7. Slow or unstable pages. Timeouts and layout shift at the payment step lose otherwise-completed purchases.Fixes worth making first
- Show shipping cost early — on the product page, or a threshold banner (“free delivery over £50”)
- Enable guest checkout, and offer account creation after purchase instead
- Cut every non-essential field. Ask yourself what each one is actually used for
- Enable address autofill and autocomplete attributes
- Add the wallets your market uses — Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay, and regional methods
- Show returns and contact information at the payment step, where doubt peaks
Measure the funnel, not the total
A single “abandonment rate” tells you nothing actionable. Instrument each step — cart, information, shipping, payment — so you can see where the loss actually occurs. Requires conversion tracking in Google Analytics. Without it, you are guessing at which step is the problem.What you cannot fix at checkout
Some abandonment is not friction:- Comparison shopping — a normal part of buying
- Saving items for later
- Price sensitivity — a checkout change will not fix an uncompetitive price
- Genuine change of mind