An abandoned shopping cart does not always mean that a customer has decided not to complete the purchase. They may be comparing offers, checking shipping costs, postponing the decision or returning to the store later using a different device.
However, if a significant number of customers abandon the purchase at the same stage, it may indicate a problem with the checkout process, platform performance, payment processing, integrations or the business logic behind the store.
According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate across the studies they analyzed is approximately 70%. This should not be treated as a universal benchmark for every online store. The result depends on factors such as industry, order value, device, traffic source and even how cart abandonment is defined.
That is why effective optimization should not begin with discount codes or remarketing campaigns. The first step is to identify where customers leave the purchase journey and understand what actually happens at that point.
If you do not have time to read the full article, the table below summarizes the most important information.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is cart abandonment? | A situation where a customer adds products to the cart but does not complete the purchase. |
| Does every abandoned cart mean lost revenue? | No. Some customers return later or use the cart to compare offers. |
| Why do customers abandon their purchase? | Common reasons include additional costs, mandatory account creation, a complicated checkout, delivery issues, lack of trust and technical problems. |
| Is UX always the main cause? | No. Payment issues, integrations, platform performance and business logic can also contribute to cart abandonment. |
| How can you identify the real cause? | Analyze the purchase funnel, e-commerce events, technical errors and customer behavior throughout the checkout journey. |
| Are abandoned cart campaigns enough? | No. If customers encounter the same obstacle again, recovery campaigns alone will not solve the problem. |
Cart abandonment occurs when a customer adds at least one product to the shopping cart but does not place an order. It is important to distinguish cart abandonment from checkout abandonment. Checkout abandonment refers to situations where the customer has already started the checkout process but leaves before reaching the order confirmation page.
This distinction is important for diagnostic purposes.
Abandonment before checkout begins often reflects price comparison, shipping cost evaluation or the customer's decision to postpone the purchase.
Abandonment during checkout is more likely to indicate friction in the ordering process.
Abandonment at the payment stage may point to an unavailable payment method, a payment authorization failure or an integration issue.
A single cart abandonment metric cannot reveal which of these scenarios is affecting your store.
No.
For many customers, the shopping cart serves as a wishlist or a convenient way to check the final order value before making a purchase decision.
Some customers:
compare offers across multiple stores,
review available shipping options,
save products for later,
discuss the purchase with someone else,
begin the purchase on a mobile device and complete it later on a desktop.
For that reason, the number of abandoned carts alone is not a reliable indicator of store quality.
What matters much more is identifying whether abandonment is concentrated at a specific checkout step, on a particular device, within a sales channel, for a payment method or for a certain product category.
The key question is: At which stage of the purchase journey do customers abandon the process, and what happens immediately before they leave?
Proper analysis starts with tracking every stage of the customer journey. In Google Analytics 4, this typically includes events such as add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase, together with reports like Purchase Journey and Checkout Journey. These reports show how many customers move to each stage and where the highest drop-off occurs.
A typical purchase funnel looks like this:
product view,
add to cart,
cart view,
begin checkout,
shipping selection,
payment selection,
order submission,
payment confirmation.
However, diagnosis should never rely solely on GA4.
Analytics data should be combined with:
application and integration logs,
JavaScript error reporting,
payment provider reports,
API response time monitoring,
session recordings and behavior analytics,
customer support requests,
segmentation by device, market and sales channel.
The purchase funnel shows where customers leave the process. Only technical and behavioral data explains why they leave.
We have implemented Google Analytics 4 in numerous Sylius projects. Get in touch for a free consultation, and we will help you determine the best tracking strategy for your platform.
Remarketing campaigns, reminder emails and recovery workflows can help recover some abandoned purchases.
What they do not do is eliminate the obstacle that caused the abandonment in the first place.
If the customer abandoned the purchase because:
the checkout rejected a valid address,
shipping costs appeared only at the final step,
the checkout stopped responding,
the selected payment method failed,
the promotion disappeared after moving to the next step,
then an abandoned cart email simply sends the customer back to exactly the same problem.
Recovery campaigns should therefore complement checkout optimization, not replace it.
Baymard Institute research shows that the most frequently reported reasons for abandoning a purchase include unexpected extra costs, slow delivery, lack of trust, mandatory account creation, a long or complicated checkout process and technical issues.
However, every online store is different. The importance of each factor depends on your customers, products and purchase journey. Every hypothesis should therefore be validated using data from your own checkout funnel.
A lengthy checkout increases cognitive load and creates more opportunities for customers to encounter friction.
The problem is not necessarily the number of checkout screens. More often, it is caused by too many required fields, unclear validation messages or asking customers to enter the same information multiple times.
How can you recognize the problem?
Customers abandon the purchase while entering personal or shipping information.
Users frequently return to previous checkout steps.
Forms generate a high number of validation errors.
Mobile conversion is significantly lower than desktop conversion.
Customer support regularly receives questions about completing the checko
How can you reduce abandonment?
Remove fields that are not required to process the order, automatically populate available customer data and provide clear validation messages.
It is also considered good practice to assume that the billing address is the same as the shipping address unless the customer decides otherwise.
Baymard Institute identifies reducing unnecessary form fields as one of the key checkout optimization practices.
Sylius supports this approach through its One Page Checkout. If you would like to implement a similar experience in your store, get in touch.
Customers may accept the product price but abandon the purchase once shipping costs, taxes, service fees or payment surcharges appear.
The issue is often not only the amount itself, but also when these additional costs are revealed.
How can you recognize the problem?
The largest drop-off occurs after the shipping method is selected.
Customers repeatedly switch between delivery options.
Abandonment is concentrated around lower-value orders.
Customer support receives questions about shipping costs or free delivery thresholds.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Shipping costs and free delivery conditions should be communicated as early as possible.
If the final shipping price depends on the delivery address, package size or shipping method, the store should clearly explain this and provide an easy way to estimate the cost before checkout.
Performance should be evaluated across the entire purchase journey, not only on the homepage.A customer may reach the shopping cart quickly but then wait while promotions are recalculated, shipping options are retrieved or the payment provider responds.
How can you recognize the problem?
Response times increase after shipping or payment selection.
Checkout performance degrades during peak traffic periods.
Customers click the same button multiple times.
Timeouts or interrupted requests occur.
Mobile performance is noticeably worse than desktop.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Measure the execution time of every checkout operation.
Then separate frontend delays from backend issues and external service dependencies.
Your analysis should include the database, cache, queues, API calls, payment provider and integrations with ERP, OMS and delivery systems
A responsive layout does not automatically mean a mobile-friendly checkout.
The form may fit the screen while still requiring too many interactions, displaying the wrong keyboard or making corrections unnecessarily difficult.
How can you recognize the problem?
Checkout completion rates are significantly lower on smartphones than on desktop devices.
Mobile users abandon the address form more frequently.
Errors occur after opening an external banking or payment application.
Returning from the payment application causes the cart or order status to be lost.
Checkout becomes unstable on mobile networks.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Test checkout on real devices, across multiple browsers and under slower network conditions.
Pay particular attention to autofill, keyboard behavior, validation messages and the transition back from banking or payment applications.
Mandatory registration remains one of the most common obstacles during checkout. Many customers simply want to complete a one-time purchase and have no intention of creating an account.
Requiring registration makes the checkout longer, increases the number of required fields and introduces additional failure points related to passwords or email verification.
How can you recognize the problem?
Customers abandon the process during login or registration.
Abandonment is significantly higher among first-time customers.
Customer support receives questions about account activation or password resets.
How can you reduce abandonment?
The recommended approach is to allow guest checkout and offer account creation only after the order has been completed.
When can this become an architectural issue?
If the checkout process is tightly coupled with customer accounts, saved addresses or loyalty programs, introducing guest checkout may require changes to the platform's data model and business logic.
Not every customer who leaves at the payment stage has failed to find their preferred payment method.In many cases, the real issue is communication between the e-commerce platform and the payment provider or delivery service.
From the customer's perspective, all they see is an error message or a checkout that stops responding, even though the underlying cause lies within the integration.
How can you recognize the problem?
Abandonment increases after payment selection.
Payment authorizations fail.
Errors occur after returning from the payment gateway.
Payments are completed successfully but no order is created.
Reports from the payment provider differ from those generated by the e-commerce platform.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Monitor the success rate of each payment method, analyze integration logs and measure the response times of external services.
Adding more payment methods will not solve the problem if unstable integrations remain the real source of checkout failures.
When can this become an architectural issue?
If checkout communicates synchronously with multiple external systems, every slow response increases the risk of interruption.
In these situations, it is worth reviewing both the integration strategy and the flow of data between services.
Customers add products to the cart at one price, only to discover during checkout that the discount has disappeared, the cart value has changed or the promotion no longer applies.
Few things damage customer trust more quickly.
How can you recognize the problem?
Customer complaints about incorrectly calculated discounts.
Frequent cart refreshes.
Abandonment after promotions are recalculated.
Differences between the displayed product price and the final order total.
How can you reduce abandonment?
The promotion engine should behave consistently and predictably across every sales channel.
Whenever prices change during checkout, the reason should be clearly communicated to the customer.
When can this become an architectural issue?
The root cause is often distributed business rules, multiple pricing sources or inconsistent synchronization between the e-commerce platform and external systems.
Customers add products to the cart, begin checkout and only discover during the ordering process that the item is unavailable. The problem is not always incorrect inventory data. It is frequently caused by delayed synchronization between the e-commerce platform, ERP and WMS.
How can you recognize the problem?
Orders are cancelled because products are unavailable.
Inventory levels shown in the store differ from warehouse data.
Customers abandon the purchase after the cart is recalculated.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Review inventory synchronization and reservation mechanisms.
Customers should receive consistent stock information throughout the entire purchase journey.
When can this become an architectural issue?
If inventory data originates from multiple systems or synchronization is delayed, changing the storefront alone will not solve the underlying problem.
Modern e-commerce platforms communicate with numerous external services.
Every API request, synchronization process and additional validation affects checkout performance.
If one integration stops responding or returns invalid data, customers rarely see the technical details.
They simply experience a checkout that no longer works.
How can you recognize the problem?
Errors occur only in specific checkout scenarios.
Checkout slows down during peak traffic periods.
Problems begin after introducing new integrations.
Logs show increased response times from external services.
How can you reduce abandonment?
Monitoring APIs, queues, application logs and integration performance should be part of ongoing platform maintenance rather than something performed only after an incident occurs.
If your cart abandonment rate is increasing, start with a focused audit of the purchase journey.
Does the checkout request only the information required to process the order?
Can customers complete a purchase without creating an account?
Is the full order cost visible before payment?
Does checkout work equally well on mobile and desktop devices?
Do all payment and delivery methods work without errors?
Are promotions and prices calculated correctly at every stage of the purchase journey?
Is inventory data consistent with the information stored in ERP and WMS systems?
Are integrations increasing checkout completion time?
Does the team analyze application logs, API errors and payment success rates?
The answers to these questions can already indicate whether the problem lies in checkout usability, business logic or the architecture of the e-commerce platform.
An increase in cart abandonment does not always mean that the entire online store needs to be rebuilt. In many cases, simplifying the checkout, improving customer communication or optimizing the performance of selected parts of the process may be enough.
There are, however, situations where the problem does not come from a single defect, but from the architecture of the entire platform.
A technical audit is worth considering when:
the cart abandonment rate continues to increase despite checkout changes,
customers report problems completing their orders,
errors occur only for specific payment or delivery methods,
the platform relies on numerous integrations with ERP, OMS, WMS or other external systems,
data shown in the store differs from data stored in internal systems,
the team cannot clearly identify the cause of declining conversion.
If you are unsure why customers abandon their shopping carts, the best starting point is an analysis of the purchase journey.
An e-commerce platform audit can determine whether the issue is caused by checkout usability, performance, integrations or system architecture.
At Commerce Weavers, we help companies growing their online sales diagnose problems in platforms built on Symfony, Sylius and Open Mercato. This allows product and engineering teams to focus on changes that have a measurable impact on conversion and business growth.
Read more about our services.
No.
Some customers return to complete the purchase after several hours or days, switch to another device or compare offers before making a decision.
This is why businesses should analyze not only the number of abandoned carts, but the entire purchase funnel.
The best approach is to combine Google Analytics 4 data, purchase funnel analysis, application logs and user session recordings.
This helps identify not only where the process was interrupted, but also its probable cause.
It can.
If customers must create an account before purchasing, the process becomes longer and more prone to errors.
For many online stores, offering guest checkout results in higher conversion.
Yes.
Long checkout loading times, delays during shipping or payment selection and slow responses from external systems can discourage customers from completing their purchase.
No.
They can increase the number of recovered orders, but they do not eliminate the reason why customers abandoned the purchase.
If the underlying problem is platform performance or an integration error, the customer will encounter the same obstacle again.
The most common issues include payment integration failures, incorrectly calculated promotions, inconsistent inventory data, long API response times, JavaScript errors and incorrect communication between the e-commerce platform and ERP, OMS or WMS systems.
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