Cart abandonment is a serious issue for many online shops – and yet, it receives disproportionately little attention.
For many shops, less than 20% of purchases get to “order completed” stage, leaving 80% of the potential revenue just hanging in the air.
I cannot count how many times I’ve sat in meetings where traffic channel owners are asked why their respective channels aren’t producing enough profit and what it would take to “fix it.” If your 5% conversion rate translates to 500 buyers instead of the 1000 we need, surely you just need to double the traffic, right?! And any attempt to talk about on-site conversion issues falls on deaf ears because “the design isn’t SO bad that people would leave just because of it!”
Of course it’s not.
No one stops in the middle of filling in their address (after already having identified that they like what you sell and are willing to buy it for the prices you offer) because they don’t love that specific shade of brown or would prefer Roboto font instead of your current Inter.
Let’s be honest: to be a profitable e-commerce, you probably have already fixed all major UX blockers a while ago.
But if you’re statistically losing a fifth of your turnover at every step of your shopping basket, you’re bleeding money you don’t need to, and it should be looked at.
So, if it’s not “too ugly”, then why are users so skittish?!
What shop owners (and people with high incomes) see as fun – researching the products, window-shopping, narrowing down your selection, making a choice, adding it to cart – can feel rather stressful for people who are bound by stricter budgets and often also previous bad experiences.
And no, it’s not a poverty problem – but it is exacerbated by inflation.
Almost everyone experiences some spending stress every time they’re buying something that costs more than 10% of their discretionary income (the “spending money” that is left of your net income after you’ve taken care of all necessary costs). The less you have, the more you stress about each decision.
Given that discretionary income in the European Union tends to stay between 15% and 25% on average (30–35% in the Nordics, around 10–15% in Eastern Europe, and around 10–20% in Southern European countries), we’re talking about any purchase that exceeds the magical 2% mark of monthly net income.
Now think of the average salary in your target markets. Then remind yourself that at least half the people make less than that. And then check your average purchase value.
The bigger the difference, the higher the baseline stress levels of your users by the time they make it to the cart.
It’s a pressure that starts with identifying the neeeeeed to buy something (way before they even land on your website) and keeps on building and building until it reaches its peak at the perceived “point of no return”. In e-com’s case, it’s the payment.
But – financial aspects are NOT the only invisible stressors your customers’ brains have to deal with (they just happen to be the part of the problem you cannot fix). There’s the cumulative effect of poorly timed efforts and confusion to consider. The micro-aggressions of buttons moving, extra information popping up, and decisions needing to be made at every step of the way.
Our brains are wired for efficiency: the faster we can react to danger, the better our chances of survival. When we encounter friction (especially after prolonged exposure to decision-heavy process), even small hurdles start to feel disproportionately uncomfortable. This is because the brain interprets unexpected complexity as a threat, triggering a subtle fight–flight–freeze response. And in online environments, “flight” is just a click away.
All of us have done it – abandoned shopping carts at the last minute, not fully understanding why. “Just changed my mind,” right? And while we can rationalise each of these decisions on an individual level post-fact if pressured to, the original reaction is more likely to have stemmed from a neurocognitive stress response to something. Closing a tab may have simply been the path of least resistance – the easiest way to reduce that discomfort.
So, the design may be pretty – and still fail the user because of a lot of very-very-little things that you may need a bit of help spotting.
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Know how much is in the wallet of your buyers:
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