5 Signs Your Online Store Is Losing Orders in the Cart
Seven out of ten carts never get paid. Five places where an online store loses orders most often, how to find them in your data and what to do about them.
In short
- On average 70% of carts stay unpaid. Some of those are people who were only comparing, but you can work with the rest.
- The most common reason for leaving is extra costs: shipping and other charges that only appear at checkout.
- Next come forced registration, a long checkout, distrust of the payment and errors on the site.
- GA4 shows where exactly people leave, through the events add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase. Without them you are guessing.
An online store loses orders in the cart when checkout surprises the customer. The usual surprises: extra shipping, forced registration, a long form or a payment they don’t trust. According to Baymard Institute, an average of 70% of carts stay unpaid. The five signs below show where orders get lost most often and how to check it in your own data.
How many orders does a cart normally lose?
Baymard Institute has collected studies on abandoned carts for years. The average across 50 studies is 70.22%. Seven out of ten people who put something in the cart end up not paying.
Some of them never meant to buy. They compared prices, saved the item for later or just worked out the shipping. That is normal, and a cart can’t fix it. You can work with the rest. By the same research, a large store can raise its conversion by 35% with a better checkout.
70% of carts stay unpaid. Part of them can be won back by improving checkout.
| Reason for leaving | Share |
|---|---|
Extra costs were too high (shipping, taxes, fees) |
40% |
Delivery was too slow |
20% |
Didn’t trust the site with card details |
19% |
The site wanted me to create an account |
18% |
Checkout was too long or complicated |
17% |
Errors or crashes on the site |
17% |
Return policy was unsatisfactory |
13% |
Couldn’t see the total cost upfront |
12% |
Too few payment methods |
9% |
Source: Baymard Institute, reasons without the people who were just browsing. One person could give several reasons.
1. The shipping price appears only at checkout
Extra costs are the most common reason for leaving. The customer works out the price in their head from the product, and in the last step finds out they pay more than expected. Some people leave right then. Many are not even annoyed. They simply rethink the purchase.
What to do: show the shipping price at the product or in the cart, before checkout. If you offer free shipping above a certain amount, tell customers in the cart how much is missing. The total price should be visible before the customer starts typing an address.
2. Checkout demands registration
Almost one in five people who left did so because of a mandatory account. The customer wants to buy once and doesn’t want to invent a password.
What to do: make checkout without registration the default path. Offer an account only after payment: you already have the email, so only a password is missing. Customers who want to collect points or track orders will create an account themselves.
3. Checkout is long or confusing
A long form is worst on mobile. Every extra field means another tap and another chance for a typo.
What to do:
- Ask only for what you really need for delivery and invoicing. Hide company details behind a checkbox like “I’m buying for a company”.
- Label fields plainly: Name, Email, Address. In the BeHoneyBee checkout we left the jokes out on purpose, even though the brand speaks playfully elsewhere on the site.
- Give each field the right type, so the phone shows a numeric keyboard for the postal code and phone number and autofill works.
- Show which step the customer is on and how many remain.
4. The customer doesn’t trust the payment or can’t find theirs
Distrust when paying by card troubles almost a fifth of the people who left. On top of that come declined cards and too few payment methods.
What to do:
- Show the logos of the payment methods and the payment gateway right in the cart.
- Offer the methods your customers actually use. The statistics in your payment gateway show where people most often give up on paying.
- Repeat what exactly the customer is buying before the payment. In BeHoneyBee every item in the summary carries its name, color and price, so a parent sees what they are ordering before they pay.
- Keep contact details, terms and the return policy one tap away in checkout.
5. The site crashes or freezes at checkout
Errors and crashes are cited by 17% of the people who left. Typically it is a form that wipes the entered data after submitting, a payment gateway that doesn’t load on mobile, or a validation that reports an error only at the end.
What to do: go through the whole purchase yourself, on a phone and over mobile data. Office Wi-Fi hides plenty of bugs. Show field errors right as people type. Entered data must never get lost when an error happens. And watch the speed: a checkout that takes five seconds to load feels broken even when it works.
How do you find out where exactly you lose orders?
Without tracking you are guessing. Google Analytics 4 has recommended events for online stores that describe the path from product to payment:
| GA4 event | What it means |
|---|---|
view_item |
The customer opened a product |
add_to_cart |
Added an item to the cart |
begin_checkout |
Started checkout |
add_shipping_info |
Chose shipping |
add_payment_info |
Chose payment |
purchase |
Paid |
From these you build a funnel in GA4 and see between which steps the most people drop off. A big drop between begin_checkout and add_shipping_info points to the shipping price or to registration. A drop between add_payment_info and purchase points to the payment or to gateway errors.
The second source is session recordings in tools like Microsoft Clarity. Five recordings of people who left checkout often tell you more than a table.
Start with the step that has the biggest drop. You can measure the fix of one step, but not ten changes at once.
How much does fixing a cart cost?
| Work | Our price |
|---|---|
UI/UX audit of the purchase path |
from €500, usually €900 |
Ongoing conversion optimization |
from €300 per month |
New e-shop |
from €4,900 |
The price is final, nothing is added on top. The audit goes through the path from product to payment on mobile and desktop and ends with a list of changes ranked by how much they can bring. Your current supplier can handle most of them. You can find the details on the UX audit page.
Abandoned carts: common questions
What cart abandonment rate is normal?
According to Baymard Institute the average across 50 studies is 70%. The number varies by industry and device. More important than comparing with the average is whether your own number improves after changes.
Do abandoned cart emails help?
They help win back some of the people who left. But they work only if the customer left an email before leaving. That is why a good checkout asks for the email as the first field. The email does not fix the cause of the exit.
Is free shipping worth it?
Free shipping removes the most common reason for leaving, but it costs money. Often it is enough to show the shipping price upfront, or to offer free shipping from an amount that an ordinary purchase easily exceeds.
Do I have to change my platform because of this?
Usually not. Shipping price in the cart, checkout without registration and a shorter form work even on a ready-made platform. Change platforms only when it won’t let you fix what the data showed.
Where should you start with your store?
Go through a purchase on your phone today, from product to payment, and write down every spot where you hesitate. Then check whether GA4 tracks the steps from the table above. If you want an outside view of your cart, get in touch. We build and fix online stores, and you can read more on the page about e-commerce development.
Bottom line
Don't fix the cart by gut feeling. Set up tracking for the steps, find the step with the biggest drop and start there. The cheapest changes tend to work best: shipping price at the product, checkout without registration and fewer fields.
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