Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is what happens when somebody adds products to a basket in an online store and then leaves without paying. It is measured as the share of baskets that never became orders, and the first useful thing to understand about it is that the share is always large. Adding to a basket is how people think in an online shop, in the way that picking something up and turning it over is how they think in a physical one.

In short

• Most abandoned baskets were never going to be orders, and that is normal.
• The rate matters less than a sudden change in it.
• Checkout abandonment is the smaller and far more expensive problem.
• Preventing it is worth more than recovering it, and costs less.

Why the number is always high

A basket is not a commitment. It is a shortlist, a way of holding a price, a note to check the delivery charge, and frequently a way of finding out the total before deciding whether to keep going. Treating every one of those as a lost sale produces a figure that looks alarming and cannot be acted on.

The comparison that matters is against yourself. A rate that has held steady for six months is describing how your customers shop. A rate that moved five points in a fortnight is describing something that changed, and that is worth an hour of somebody’s attention.

The reasons people actually leave

Ranked roughly by how often they turn out to be the culprit in a small store.

• The total was a surprise. Delivery, handling or a fee appearing at the last step, after the shopper had a number in their head.
• They were not ready. Comparing, saving for payday, or waiting to ask somebody.
• An account was demanded before payment, which asks for effort in return for nothing the shopper wanted.
• The form was long, or asked for things that made no sense for a small order.
• The payment method they use was missing. In the Philippines that frequently means cash on delivery, GCash or Maya, and a store offering only cards has quietly excluded a large share of its market.
• Something did not work, most often on a phone, and most often on a step nobody has tested recently.

Checkout abandonment is the expensive one

The two numbers get discussed together and they are not the same problem. Somebody who added to a basket and wandered off may never have intended to buy. Somebody who entered a delivery address and stopped had decided, and then the process lost them.

That makes checkout the place to look first. It is a shorter sequence, it is fully under your control, and every improvement applies to every future order rather than to one campaign. A store with limited attention should spend it here before spending it anywhere else.

Preventing it beats recovering it

Recovery gets the attention because it is easy to attribute, but almost everything that works is done before the shopper reaches the basket.

• Show the delivery cost early, on the product page if possible. The surprise is the single most common cause on the list above, and it is the one entirely within your gift.
• Offer the payment methods your market uses, rather than the ones the platform enabled by default.
• Allow checkout without an account.
• Cut fields. Every one you remove is a small increase in the share of people who reach the end.
• Show the progress, so somebody on step two knows there is not a step seven waiting.
• Test the whole thing on a phone, on mobile data, as a stranger would. This finds more problems than any report will.

Recovering the ones you can

A share of abandoned baskets can be brought back, and the mechanism is unglamorous.

The reminders are built once as an email flow rather than sent by hand. The first goes out within a few hours, while the intention is still real, and it works best when it simply shows what was left and makes returning to it one tap. A second follows the next day. A third is where most stores stop, because the recovery beyond that is small and the cost in unsubscribes is not.

None of this reaches somebody who never gave you an address, which is why asking for the email early in the checkout, before the delivery details rather than after, changes how much of this is available to you at all. It also has to be asked for properly. The Philippines has a Data Privacy Act, and an address collected to complete an order is not automatically an address you may market to, so the permission has to be requested rather than assumed.

When the problem is not in the checkout at all

Sometimes the checkout is fine and the traffic is wrong. A store running advertising against broad, cheap searches will fill its baskets with people who were browsing, and no amount of work on the payment step will convert somebody who was never buying.

The signal to look for is a rate that worsened at the same time as traffic improved. That combination often means the newer visitors are a poorer match than the older ones, and if it does, the fix sits in the campaign rather than in the store. It can also mean a promotion, a seasonal shift or a change shipped the same week, so it is worth ruling those out first. Sending paid traffic to a page written for the thing that was advertised, instead of to a category listing, is the ordinary version of this fix. The reasoning behind it is on the landing page entry.

It is worth ruling this out before rebuilding a checkout, because rebuilding a checkout is expensive and changing where the adverts point is not.

Measuring it honestly

One number for the whole store is close to useless, because it averages together groups that behave nothing like each other.

Instrument each step rather than only the start and the end. Knowing that people leave tells you nothing; knowing that they leave on the delivery step is a task somebody can be given. Keep phone and desktop apart, since a combined figure hides both stories. Watch first-time buyers separately from regulars, because a stranger hesitating and a regular hesitating are different problems with different fixes. And count recovered orders on their own, so the reminders are judged on what they actually rescued rather than folded into a total that flatters them.

All of that has to be in place before a campaign starts. Reconstructing it afterwards is the point at which most of these questions stop being answerable, and it is the reason so many stores can describe the problem confidently and cannot say where it happens. This is all part of tracking.