In order to address cart abandonment in your online store, you need to understand what causes customers to abandon their carts in the first place. There are as many reasons for cart abandonment as there are customers, but fortunately, we have decades’ worth of eCommerce data that can help us identify the most common reasons:

• A pricing discrepancy in which the price is higher than expected.
• Something about the checkout procedure is confusing to the customer.
• The checkout process is too slow and annoying.
• The customer has doubts about the security of their payment information.
• The customer realizes they can’t pay with the method they want to use.
• The store requires a login/password and the customer doesn’t want to sign up
• The customer’s coupon code doesn’t work, or another expected discount doesn’t apply.
• The customer decided to wait before purchasing.
• The customer got distracted and forgot to finish checking out.
• The customer just put things in their cart to see what the total price would be.
• The customer found the same item elsewhere at a lower price.

Some of these reasons represent issues that you can address, whether by making changes to your online store or by interacting with the customer. Of course, you can’t fix some of these problems (such as the customer having already made their purchase elsewhere), so you shouldn’t expect to be able to recover 100% of your abandoned carts. However, with properly implemented solutions, you can recover the vast majority of them.

Before you can solve cart abandonment in your online store, you need to thoroughly evaluate which of the listed issues your customers might be encountering, and then address these issues one by one. Each cause for cart abandonment will require its own solution, which we’ll address in the following lessons.