Identify why abandoned carts are happening: A data-driven approach using visualization and analytics software

If you run an ecommerce store, we know how frustrating abandoned carts can be, especially after investing time and money into ad campaigns. Know that you're not alone. According to Barnyard Institute, nearly every ecommerce store deals with shopping cart abandonment, with an average rate of around 70.19%. While this is a widely cited average, actual abandonment rates vary based on industry and product category. Categories like clothing, tech, and home goods often see higher cart abandonment rates compared to essentials like fitness products, food, and accessories. If your abandoned cart rate falls between 60-80% or even lower, it's within the expected range for most industries.

How to calculate your cart abandonment rate

Before diving into the reasons and their solutions, Here's a formula for you to measure your website's abandonment rate correctly:

Cart abandonment rate: Cart Abandonment Rate = [Number of abandoned carts / (Number of completed purchases + Number of abandoned carts)] * 100

If you don’t have direct access to abandoned cart data, you can estimate it by subtracting your total purchases from the number of visitors who reached the cart page.

Why people abandon their carts and how to prevent it 

To fix the abandoned cart issue, we must first understand why it happens. Here are the most common reasons and solutions to them.

Unexpected costs

I'm pretty sure every online shopper is a victim of surprise costs.

Screenshot courtesy: QUORA

While people expect to pay for taxes and perhaps shipping, no one likes to pay unreasonable amounts or to encounter random additional charges at checkout. Customers are most likely to abandon their carts.

Solutions:

• Show estimated shipping fees upfront. Display shipping costs on product pages or provide a shipping calculator in the cart to prevent last-minute surprises.

• Offer free shipping thresholds. Encourage larger purchases by offering free shipping on orders above a certain amount.

• Include shipping in product prices. One of the safest approaches is to offer all-inclusive pricing to eliminate uncertainty.

• Be clear about international fees. if you serve global customers, you may not control duties and customs fees, but you can inform them in advance about potential charges.

• Transparency in pricing reduces friction, builds trust, and ensures a smoother checkout experience—leading to more purchases.

Complicated checkout process

You can't just ambush your potential customers with too many form fields, unnecessary steps, or forced account creation—it's the best way to drive them away. Every extra step in the user journey to make them complete the payment process increases the chances of drop-offs and abandoned conversions.

Solutions:

• Simplify checkout by allowing guest checkout. Use autofill and saved address features, and reduce form fields to only essential ones.

• Always ask yourself: Do we really need this input? We've all seen websites asking for unnecessary information—like a marriage date or birthdays—and worse, only to make it a mandatory field. This not only frustrates users but also increases the chances of cart abandonment.

• Use form analytics to uncover key insights into user behavior, such as which fields cause drop-offs, the total time taken to submit a form, the ratio of interactions to abandonment, and more. These insights help you optimize your forms, reduce friction, and improve conversions.

Additionally, you can leverage session recording to watch real user interactions on your website. For instance, PageSense allows you to segment visitors based on specific actions, such as those who started filling out a checkout form but didn’t complete it. By analyzing these recordings, you can pinpoint friction points and refine your checkout form experience.

Limited payment options and security concerns

Shoppers are unlikely to enter their personal or payment details on a site that lacks an SSL certificate (HTTPS). Most browsers display a "Not Secure" warning for such sites, instantly raising red flags for visitors. Missing trust badges, unclear return policies, or a lack of social proof can make your site appear unreliable. To make matters worse, using an unfamiliar payment processor/process can add fuel to the fire.

Solutions:

• Display security badges (SSL, PCI compliance, trusted payment processors). Offer well-known payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, or Google Pay. Enable local currency payments for international customers.

• You can also display a visible support email, phone number, or live chat to reassure customers that help is available, especially for payment issues, missing order confirmations, or order cancellations.

• Implement heatmaps to see the how far users scroll and the average time spent by the users on each section. For example, you might have already provided the email address and the phone number on your website, but it's buried at the bottom of the page. Your heatmap data shows most visitors don’t scroll that far, which means you should consider moving them higher up to increase visibility and boost conversions.

Slow-loading pages

Not sure how fast your website loads? Use this free tool to check your page speed: Google PageSpeed Insights.

The ideal page load time in 2025 is two seconds or less—especially for ecommerce sites. Not to state the obvious, but faster load times do lead to a better user experience, higher engagement, and increased conversions.

Solutions:

• Start by optimizing images. There are a lot of free websites that offer image compressing. Enable caching since browser caching stores website data locally, reducing load times for returning visitors.

• Minimize redirects and eliminate unnecessary scripts and plugins, as they can slow down checkout pages. If you're using a website performance-optimized tool like Zoho PageSense, which doesn’t impact load times, you're good to go.

• Additionally, implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content efficiently and speed up your site.

If you’ve optimized everything and speed is still an issue, consider upgrading to a reliable hosting provider or a higher-performance server to improve response times.

Distractions 

Customers may click on your ad, love your product, and even add it to their wishlist—but sometimes life gets in the way. Whether it’s an Internet disruption, a dead phone battery, or an urgent task, they might have to close their browser before completing the purchase. While you can’t control these interruptions, you can take steps to bring them back.

Solutions:

• Keep your shoppers engaged.

• Enable persistent cart features. Ensure items stay saved across devices so customers can easily resume their purchase.

• Use exit-intent pop-ups and push notifications. Trigger targeted pop-ups with limited-time discounts when users are about to leave, creating urgency and giving them a reason to stay and complete their order. With Zoho PageSense's pop-ups, you can even customize the timing based on how long users typically take to complete a purchase. Enable push notifications to re-engage visitors even when they’re no longer on your site by sending timely reminders or exclusive offers.

Sometimes, visitors might be casually browsing or simply can't find what they're looking for. In such cases, you can gather valuable insights by directly asking for feedback through a pop-up.

Poor user experience or technical glitches

A frustrating or broken website experience can quickly drive customers away. If your checkout process is confusing, a specific category page isn’t functioning properly, or your site suffers from bugs, crashes, or slow load times, users are likely to abandon their purchase.  Even minor issues like broken buttons, unresponsive design, or a laggy interface can erode trust and cost you sales.

Solutions:

Identify and fix user friction. To truly understand what’s causing friction, glitches, and abandoned sessions, you need to step into your visitors' shoes and analyze their behavior. Zoho PageSense provides the behavioral and qualitative data needed to uncover these pain points.

Funnel Analysis: Map your visitor journeys and pinpoint where users drop off in the conversion process. Gain insights into:

• Which step in the funnel has the highest drop-off rate

• Which customer segments convert the most

• The average time spent on each page and more

Funnel analysis tells you where visitors drop off, but not why. That’s where PageSense’s other built-in tools come in, offering both qualitative and quantitative insights to help you fix bottlenecks and improve the user experience.

Heatmaps: See where users click, scroll, or get stuck on your pages, helping you identify usability issues.

Session recording: Watch real user sessions to spot errors, broken elements, and frustrating interactions. You can even record segments based on specific behaviors—for example, analyzing the sessions of users who abandoned their cart after adding products to the cart. This helps you uncover distractions or obstacles that prevented them from completing their purchase.

A/B testing: Experiment with different page layouts and checkout flows to find what works best for conversions.

Does  A/B testing reduce shopping cart abandonment?

There are various strategies where A/B testing can be implemented to help you identify and implement the most effective checkout experience. Here’s how:

Optimize checkout flow: Test different checkout layouts, form lengths, and button placements.

Reduce distractions: Experiment with minimal vs. detailed checkout pages to see which keeps users focused on completing their purchase.

Test payment options and trust signals: Compare checkout pages with different payment gateways, trust badges, and security assurances to determine what makes customers feel safer.

Improve Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons: Try different wording, colors, and placements for CTA buttons like "Complete Purchase" or "Pay Now" to encourage more checkouts.

Trigger personalized discount messages: A/B test limited-time offers, free shipping messages, or exit-intent pop-ups to see what motivates hesitant buyers to complete their order.

While A/B testing is essential for optimizing the checkout experience, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. To reduce abandonment rates effectively, you also need to:

• Conduct user research to understand why visitors abandon their carts.

• Analyze website performance, load times, and other KPIs to ensure a seamless experience.

• Identify and fix technical glitches or UX bottlenecks that may be causing frustration.

• Combine A/B testing with behavioral insights, website analytics, and performance optimization. This helps businesses significantly improve customer satisfaction and boost conversions.

Use optimization tools like Zoho PageSense to analyze your data, test improvements, and refine your checkout experience, thereby reducing cart abandonment and offering a better user experience.