You paid for the visit. Seven in ten carts still get left. The fixes are dull, cheap, and worth more than most ad tests.
Every dollar spent in the ad account arrives at a product page. If that page and the checkout behind it lose a few more people than they should, every campaign costs more than it has to, and no amount of creative testing will show you why.
The Baymard Institute has averaged 50 studies of online cart abandonment and puts the rate at about 70% Reported. Some of that is people browsing with no intent to buy. Baymard also surveys US shoppers who abandoned a checkout about why, setting aside the “just browsing” answers.
| Reason for leaving the checkout | Share of shoppers |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) | 40% |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% |
| Didn’t trust the site with card details | 19% |
| Had to create an account | 18% |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% |
| Returns policy wasn’t good enough | 13% |
| Couldn’t see the total cost up front | 12% |
ReportedBaymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics, 2025. Shoppers could give more than one reason.
Read the list again with your own site in mind. Almost every line is something the shopper learned too late: the shipping cost, the delivery date, the return terms, the need for an account. The cheapest checkout fix is usually to tell people earlier.
Most checkout losses are surprises. Tell people the cost, the date and the terms before they reach the checkout.
Northwestern’s Spiegel Research Center found that a product with five reviews was about 270% more likely to be bought than one with none Reported. Displaying reviews raised conversion more for expensive items (380%) than for cheap ones (190%). And purchase likelihood peaked at an average rating between 4.0 and 4.7, then fell as ratings approached a perfect 5.0. Shoppers distrust perfection. Don’t hide your 3-star reviews; answer them.
A 2020 study by Deloitte Digital for Google followed 37 brands and found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed went with 8.4% more conversions and 9.2% higher order values for retail sites Reported. It’s observational and it was commissioned by Google, which has its own stake in a faster mobile web, so don’t bank the exact figures. The direction is not in doubt, and most DTC stores carry apps and scripts that no one has audited in years.
A product page answers four questions in the order a stranger asks them: what is it, is it for me, can I trust it, and what happens if I’m wrong. Most pages answer the first at length and the last in the footer. Put the answer to “is it for me” in the first screen on a phone: who it’s for, the problem it solves, a photo of it in use. Put trust next: reviews, the count and the average. Put the delivery date, the return terms and the total cost near the button. Everything else, the brand story, the materials, the founder’s note, goes below for the people who scroll.
This is one chapter of The Whole Machine, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.