The Baymard Institute has aggregated 50 separate studies on cart abandonment. The average documented rate is 70.22%. Seven in ten people who put something in a basket do not buy it. Some of that is unavoidable. Baymard found 42% of shoppers abandoned simply because they were browsing and not ready to buy, which no amount of checkout work will recover. The rest is yours to lose, and the reasons people give are consistent enough to work through as a checklist.
The documented reasons, in order
Excluding the browsers, this is what shoppers say made them leave: Note what is not on that list. Nobody abandoned because the product photography was insufficiently aspirational or the brand story was thin. The causes are practical, and four of the six are things you can change in WooCommerce this week.
- 40% extra costs were too high (shipping, tax, fees)
- 20% delivery was too slow
- 19% did not trust the site with card details
- 18% the site required creating an account
- 17% the checkout was too long or complicated
- 17% the website had errors or crashed
Surprise costs, the single largest cause
Forty per cent. Nothing else comes close. The problem is almost never that the shipping is expensive. It is that the shopper did not know about it until step three of the checkout, having already mentally committed to a different total. That feels like being caught out, and people leave irritated rather than merely undecided. In WooCommerce, put the shipping calculator on the cart page and enable it on the basket rather than leaving it to the checkout. Better still, state delivery cost on the product page itself. If you can afford a free delivery threshold, show progress towards it in the basket, because "spend £12 more for free delivery" reliably increases order value rather than costing you margin. UK specific: show prices inclusive of VAT to consumers throughout. A price that grows by 20% at the final step is the most damaging version of this problem, and for B2C it is also the wrong way round under UK pricing rules.
Delivery speed, and being honest about it
A fifth of abandonments come down to delivery being too slow. UK shoppers have been trained by the large retailers to expect next day as an option, even when they do not choose it. You do not need to match that. You need to be specific rather than vague. "Delivered by Thursday 12 September if you order in the next 6 hours" outperforms "2 to 4 working days" even when it describes the same thing, because it removes the guessing. Offering a paid faster option also helps the people who need it, and the ones who do not will feel better about choosing standard. Be clear about the carrier too. Royal Mail, DPD and Evri carry very different reputations, and shoppers who have had a bad run with one of them want to know before they order, not after.
Trust, which is mostly small visual things
Nineteen per cent did not trust the site with their card details. That judgement is made in seconds and on surface signals. What helps: a working padlock and no mixed content warnings, recognisable payment logos rendered properly rather than as a blurry image, a real returns policy that a person can find without hunting, a UK phone number or address in the footer, and reviews on the product itself. Adding Klarna or Clearpay does more than offer instalments. For a lot of shoppers the presence of a name they recognise is itself the reassurance, because it implies somebody else has vetted you. State your returns terms plainly. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations most UK online purchases carry a 14 day cancellation right, so you are offering it whether you advertise it or not. Advertising it converts better than staying quiet about it.
Forced account creation, the easiest fix on the list
Eighteen per cent leave because you made them register. In WooCommerce this is one checkbox: WooCommerce, Settings, Accounts and Privacy, allow customers to place orders without an account. You can still offer an account after the order is placed, at which point the customer has a reason to want one. Requiring it beforehand asks for commitment before you have earned any.
Checkout length, and the fields you do not need
The default WooCommerce checkout asks for company name and a second address line for every order. Most stores need neither. Every field is a small tax on completion, paid by every customer. Add a UK postcode lookup so people type six characters instead of four lines. Turn off the separate billing address unless you genuinely need it. Keep the whole thing on one page if your product range allows it.
Errors and crashes, which are usually speed
Seventeen per cent hit something broken. In WooCommerce this is rarely a dramatic failure. It is a checkout that takes eleven seconds to update after a postcode is entered, on a store running thirty plugins on shared hosting, where the shopper concludes it has hung and closes the tab. Cart and checkout pages cannot be page cached, so they expose your actual server performance in a way the rest of the site does not. Test yours on a phone on mobile data, add something to the basket, and time it. Then audit the plugins, because on most stores we look at, two or three are responsible for the majority of the load.
Where to start
Take the two largest causes first. Show total delivery cost before the checkout, and turn off forced registration. Between them they address well over half of the stated reasons, and neither needs a developer. Then measure. WooCommerce will not tell you your abandonment rate on its own, so set up funnel tracking before you change anything else, or you will be guessing about whether the next change helped.
Related reading
- The trust and friction points above are a design problem as much as a technical one: the psychology behind conversion-centric UI and UX.
- If your store takes enquiries as well as orders, the same failures appear on the contact form: five things we check when a site has traffic but no enquiries.
- Selling in Pakistan rather than the UK changes which payment methods matter and why cash on delivery persists: what the 92% digital payments figure means for a small shop.
Want your checkout looked at?
Send us your store URL and we will go through the checkout as a customer would, on a phone, and send back what we found and what we would change first. Free, and written in plain English rather than as a plugin shopping list. Book a free consultation at devsioservices.com/contact, or read about our ecommerce and WooCommerce speed work at devsioservices.com/services/ecommerce-development and devsioservices.com/services/woocommerce-speed-optimization.
