Cart abandonment: why customers leave at checkout and how to win the sale back

Think about the most expensive moment in an online store. It isn't when someone lands on the site and leaves at once — they never meant to buy. The most expensive moment is another one: the customer searched for the product, found it, put it in the cart, hit "Checkout" — and then, one step from paying, closed the page. They wanted to buy. They almost bought. And yet you ended up with no sale, even though you paid for the ad that brought them, built the page that convinced them, and held the stock that was waiting for them.

The bad news: it isn't a one-off. According to the Baymard Institute — the global reference in checkout research — the average documented cart abandonment rate, calculated across 50 studies, is 70.22%. That is, on average, seven in ten people who already put something in the cart never finish the order. The good news: a large part of that abandonment isn't about price or "they changed their mind," but about friction at checkout you can fix. Baymard estimates an average store can gain up to a 35% conversion uplift from a better checkout alone. In this article we look at why people leave right at the end, and what specifically gets fixed.

Why checkout abandonment isn't the same as "didn't sell"

It's easy to blame traffic ("not enough people coming") or price ("too expensive"). But cart abandonment is a category of its own, and that's exactly why it's so valuable. The person who abandons the cart has already told you, by their actions, that they want the product: they searched, chose it, agreed with the price on the listing. They reached the final step. If they leave there, the problem is no longer desire — it's the road. Somewhere between the "Add to cart" button and the order confirmation, something stopped them.

That completely changes how you tackle the problem. You don't need more traffic to sell more; you need to stop losing the customers you already have at the till. It's the cheapest sale in the world — the customer is already there. That's why checkout deserves more attention than almost any other page in the store. Let's look at what breaks it, in order of how much it matters.

The real causes of abandonment — and what each one costs you

Baymard has ranked, for years, the reasons people abandon the cart. Here are the ones that matter most for a store in Moldova, translated into everyday language:

• Surprise costs at the end. The biggest order-killer. The customer sees the product price, agrees, reaches payment — and only there appear the delivery fee, commissions or other costs they didn't expect. The "trap" feeling is enough to close the page. The fix: show the total cost as early as possible, ideally already in the cart, with no surprises on the final screen.
• A forced account before buying. You make the person create an account, confirm an email, invent yet another password — all before you've taken their money. Many simply give up. The fix: offer guest checkout. Let them buy with name, phone and address; the account is optional, afterwards.
• A long, confusing checkout. Ten fields, unclear steps, a form asking for things it doesn't need. Every extra field is a chance they'll quit. The fix: ask only for what's strictly needed to deliver the order, and show clearly which step the customer is on.
• Too few payment methods. If you accept only one card or only a transfer, you cut out customers. In Moldova, people want familiar options — card, cash on delivery, local solutions. We wrote at length about adding local payments in our guide to the Paynet and Shopify integration.
• A lack of trust at the moment of payment. The page looks untidy, the security padlock (https) isn't visible, there's no return policy, no real phone number. At the step where someone takes out their card, any doubt weighs double.
• A slow or freezing page. If the payment screen loads slowly or throws errors, the customer doesn't call to tell you — they leave. We wrote about what slowness costs you in our piece on page speed and Core Web Vitals.

Notice the pattern: almost none of the causes are "your product is bad." They're process friction. And process friction gets fixed without changing anything about the offer.

How to fix your checkout, step by step

You don't need to rebuild the whole store. You need to clear the last stretch, the one from cart to confirmation. Here's the practical order:

• Full cost transparency. Show delivery and any commission before the payment step. If you offer free delivery over a threshold, say it early — it's also a reason to add more to the cart.
• Enable guest checkout. Buying as a guest, with the account option after the order. This alone recovers a meaningful slice of abandonment.
• Shorten the form. Only name, contact, delivery address, payment method. Auto-fill where possible. A single screen or clearly numbered steps.
• Add familiar payment methods. Card, cash on delivery and local solutions. The faster the customer finds their usual method, the less they abandon.
• Build visible trust. A secure connection, a clear return policy, a real contact, reviews. Small signals that, at the payment step, make the difference.
• Make checkout fast and flawless on the phone. Most purchases start on mobile. Big buttons, easy fields, zero needless steps. Many of these problems are surfaced by a UX audit.

None of these steps requires a big budget. They require attention to the right detail — exactly the detail most stores ignore, because they look at traffic, not at the end of the road.

An abandoned cart isn't lost: how to win the customer back

Even with a flawless checkout, some people will leave — they got distracted, wanted to compare, didn't have the card at hand. This is where the second part begins: recovery. If you have the customer's data (an email left behind or a tracked visit), you can bring them back. A "you left something in your cart" message, a well-timed reminder, a small offer can recover a good share of lost orders. We wrote about bringing back visitors who didn't buy the first time in our remarketing guide.

And there's one more piece many stores miss: what happens to the customer who abandoned but left a contact, or who ordered and then went quiet. If that contact lands in a system that catches and tracks it — a CRM — you can recover the sale with a call or a message at the right moment, not two weeks later when the customer has already bought elsewhere. A good checkout reduces abandonment; remarketing and the CRM recover those who still leave. Together, they turn "seven in ten left" into a far smaller number.

Seen this way, checkout isn't a technical page at the end of the store — it's the finish line of every leu spent on ads, on SEO, on the product and the photos. All the effort to bring the customer in is decided on those few screens. If you want to fix your checkout, add local payments and tie it all to a system that loses no order, start from our services page.

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