Abandoned cart: remove the causes, then follow up just once

What an abandoned cart is, and the share that is normal

“Panier abandonné” (abandoned cart) is searched 90 times a month in France, “relance panier abandonné” (abandoned cart follow-up) 50 times. A cart is abandoned when a visitor adds a product, then leaves the site without paying. The abandonment rate is the number of unpaid carts divided by the number of carts created.

Part of this abandonment cannot be fixed: in Baymard’s survey, 42% of US shoppers say they abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing” and not ready to buy. They use the cart as a list. The other reasons, measured outside that group, are the ones that cost you sales.

The causes you can remove

Here are the abandonment reasons Baymard recorded, and the fix that matches each one:

1. 1
   Costs: show the delivery cost and lead time on the product page, and the total from the cart onwards. A cost discovered at checkout is the leading cause of abandonment.
2. 2
   Account: offer guest checkout. The account can be created after payment, in one click.
3. 3
   Length: remove every field that is not needed to deliver or invoice. Baymard counts an average of 23.48 form elements shown by default on a US checkout: every extra field is a reason to leave.
4. 4
   Trust: payment on a recognised secure page, the logos of the payment methods you actually accept, your contact details in plain sight.
5. 5
   Returns: state the returns policy in one clear sentence near the button, and honour it. In France, the law already grants a right of withdrawal of at least 14 calendar days for most distance purchases.
6. 6
   Payment methods: Apple Pay and Google Pay spare shoppers from typing a card number on mobile.

The journey we use on our own sites

On our shops and our PDF guide sites, we removed the steps before payment one by one. The decisions that stuck:

• 4 October 2026: One click to the payment page: price visible, no page in between, no account.
• 17 October 2026: Every page three clicks or fewer from the home page through real HTML links, checked every week by our own crawler.
• 12 October 2026: Bundles from €49 to €149 that group small products, rather than sales at €5 to €12.

The principle: the button leads to payment, and everything that can wait until after payment waits. A cart only makes sense if the buyer really takes several products; on a site that sells a single guide or a single service, it adds a step and loses sales.

Following up an abandoned cart: once, usefully, by the rules

A reminder is only possible if you have the email address and the right to use it. Asking for the email early, “to find your purchase again”, is legitimate; making it mandatory before payment loses sales. Use that address for the order in progress, not for a newsletter the buyer never asked for.

Our rule: a single reminder, a few hours after abandonment, written as a service and approved by hand before it goes live.

1. 1
   Subject line: the product name, not a promise. Example: “Your guide is still available”.
2. 2
   Content: the product, its total price, a direct link to payment, and the answer to the most common question (lead time, returns, format).
3. 3
   No fake countdown and no discount created for the occasion: a buyer who learns that abandoning lowers the price will abandon next time.
4. 4
   An unsubscribe link that works, and every reminder stopped as soon as the purchase is made.
5. 5
   Measurement: carts recovered by the reminder, against reminders sent, every month.

Three special cases: expensive products, digital products, quote requests

An expensive product is rarely bought on the first visit. Abandonment is often a thinking stage: the buyer compares, shows the product to someone, waits for payday. Here, the reminder must bring what was missing to decide (dimensions, compatibility, real lead time, return conditions), and the product page should make coming back easy, for example with a share link or a saved cart.

A digital product (PDF guide, template, course) has no shipping cost or lead time: abandonment comes mostly from doubt about the content or a checkout that is too long. A real table of contents, an excerpt and immediate access after payment, stated under the button, cover the essentials.

On a service website, the equivalent of the abandoned cart is the quote form started and then left. The causes are the same: too many fields, off-putting questions (exact budget, mandatory phone number), no indication of response time. Three to five fields, a stated call-back time and a tappable phone number next to the form are often enough.

Measuring abandonment on your site

In Google Analytics 4, the add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase events give the three figures that matter: carts created, checkouts started, checkouts completed. The ratio between two steps shows where the leak is.

Watch out for one-click journeys: a purchase that goes straight to the payment page may not fire begin_checkout. That is why we do not publish a purchase to checkout-start ratio for our sites: it would be meaningless.