Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is the share of shoppers who add items to a basket and leave without completing the purchase — around 70% across e-commerce by most studies — of which a meaningful part happens at the payment step: a forced account, a missing payment method, a clumsy authentication, a decline, a form that fails on a phone. Payments teams own that part, measure it as checkout abandonment, and recover it with guest checkout, wallets, local methods, frictionless authentication and retries.
- Also known as
- Checkout abandonment, Basket abandonment, Abandoned carts
- Used at
- every e-commerce funnel analysis; the payments team's slice is the checkout-to-payment-success rate, the metric that PSPs, checkout vendors and orchestration platforms sell against
- Binding
- no rule — but SCA in Europe made authentication abandonment a regulated cost, and the exemptions the answer
- Typical figures
- overall cart abandonment 65–75% (Baymard's long-running average is about 70%); of shoppers who reach the payment page, 10–25% abandon; surveyed reasons include extra costs shown late, being forced to create an account, a long form, no trusted payment method, a declined card, and a checkout that fails on mobile
- Typical payments levers
- guest checkout, saved cards and wallets (one tap instead of a form), local payment methods per market, 3DS 2 with exemptions and full data (frictionless rates up, challenge abandonment down), instant retry on soft declines, address autofill, a mobile-first form
- Parties
- the merchant's product and payments teams, the PSP or checkout vendor, the issuers (whose challenges and declines are part of it), and the shopper who leaves
How cart abandonment works in practice
Ten thousand shoppers add to basket. Seven thousand leave before checkout — browsing, comparing, distracted; not the payments team's problem. Three thousand start checkout. Four hundred leave at the account-creation wall; two hundred at a form that asks for a phone number and a company name; three hundred at a payment page that offers only cards in a market that pays by bank transfer; one hundred and fifty at a 3-D Secure challenge that redirected them to a page their bank's app never opened; one hundred at a decline the merchant did not retry. Eighteen hundred and fifty pay. The payments team's abandonment is 38% of those who started checkout, and every one of those reasons has a fix.
The fixes are known and cumulative. Guest checkout removes the wall. Wallets — Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal — turn a form into a tap. Local methods give each market what it uses. Authentication with full data and exemptions cuts challenges; in-app challenges cut the abandonment on those that remain. Retry logic and cascading recover declines that were not the customer's fault. A checkout tested on a three-year-old phone on a slow connection catches the rest. Each is worth points, and points on a large funnel are millions.
For a payments company the checkout conversion it delivers is the product; for a buyer of an e-commerce business, checkout abandonment against the category's norm is a line in commercial diligence.
Example
A fashion retailer's checkout converts 62% of shoppers who start it. Its payments and product teams run a programme over two quarters: guest checkout (+5 points), Apple Pay and Google Pay (+4), local methods in three markets (+3 in those markets), 3DS 2 with full data and TRA exemptions (+3, as challenges fall from 40% to 15%), instant retry on soft declines (+1), address autofill and a mobile form rebuild (+2). Checkout conversion reaches 79%. On €50m of prior sales, the uplift is worth about €13m a year at the same traffic, for a programme that cost €400,000 and a PSP fee increase of 0.05%. The marketing team's budget for the same €13m of sales would have been €4m.
Common mistakes
- Measuring cart abandonment as one number and never splitting the checkout step by cause. - Forcing account creation before payment. - A single payment method in markets that use others. - Treating authentication abandonment as the regulator's fault when the data population and exemptions are the merchant's. - Optimising checkout on the desktop the product team uses rather than the phones the customers do.