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Most ecommerce stores lose the majority of the carts shoppers create. Baymard Institute’s current research puts the average online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, meaning roughly seven out of every 10 carts don’t progress to finished orders. So it’s worth it for a company to look at how to reduce cart abandonment.
That doesn’t mean seven out of 10 shoppers were never serious about buying. Some are browsing, comparing prices or saving products for later. But a large number of carts are abandoned because the buying experience creates friction at the wrong moment. Surprise shipping costs, taxes or fees change the economics of a purchase. Long checkout forms create unnecessary work. Forced account creation adds another obstacle. A shopper who was ready to buy may decide the hassle isn’t worth it.
That’s why reducing cart abandonment starts with fixing the checkout process itself, not simply sending more marketing messages. Once the preventable friction is gone, recovery emails, SMS and retargeting can bring some of the remaining shoppers back. Here’s what actually causes abandonment, what you can fix yourself and where a more sophisticated recovery strategy takes over.
Baymard’s current research puts average ecommerce cart abandonment at 70.22% across 50 studies. Its latest research also separates unavoidable browsing behavior from problems retailers can actually address. About 42% of U.S. online shoppers said they abandoned a cart because they were just browsing or not ready to buy. The more useful question is what happens when shoppers are ready to consider buying but something gets in the way.
The biggest problem shoppers report is extra costs that are too high, including shipping, taxes and fees. Forty percent of shoppers who abandoned carts for reasons other than simply browsing cited this issue. Other major factors included slow delivery, lack of trust in the site with credit card information, forced account creation and a checkout process that was too long or complicated. That pattern matters because most of these problems are not mysterious. They’re clear user experience problems.
A shopper shouldn’t have to reach the final payment screen to discover that shipping adds $18 to a $60 order. They shouldn’t have to create an account just to buy something once. They shouldn’t have to fill out a form with fields the store doesn’t actually need.
Trust is also a major factor. The payment screen is the point where a shopper has to decide whether to hand over money, as well as sensitive information. If the page looks outdated, loads slowly or doesn’t clearly communicate that payment is secure, hesitation can become abandonment.
The good news is that these issues are fixable. Baymard’s research found that the average checkout potentially reduced the number of form elements shown by 20% to 60%, depending on the site.
Start by making checkout as easy as possible for someone who has already decided to buy. Offer guest checkout. Requiring a shopper to create an account before a purchase adds friction and doesn’t really offer much value for the shopper. If creating an account adds value for the customer, give them the option to create one after the purchase instead of making it a condition of completing the order.
Delete unnecessary form fields. Ask only for the information required to process, fulfill or support the order. Baymard’s research found that 17% of U.S. online shoppers abandoned an order because checkout was too long or complicated. It also found that the average checkout displays considerably more form elements than an optimized flow needs. Scrutinize every field. Do you need a second address line? Is the phone number actually required? Can billing and shipping information be handled more efficiently?
Then make the remaining steps obvious. A visible progress bar or clear step indicator tells shoppers where they are in the checkout process and how many steps remain. The goal is simple: remove uncertainty and unnecessary work between “I want this” and “order confirmed.”
The worst time to introduce a major cost is after the shopper has invested time entering information. Baymard reports that 40% of shoppers who abandon carts for reasons other than simply browsing cite extra costs such as shipping, taxes and fees as those reasons. Another 12% say they abandoned the cart because they couldn’t see or calculate the total order cost up front.
Give shoppers a realistic picture of what they will pay as early as possible. Show shipping options on the product page or in the cart whenever possible. Make tax calculations clear. If fees apply, explain them before the final payment step.
Free shipping can reduce friction, but it’s not automatically the right answer. For a margin-conscious ecommerce business, the question is whether absorbing shipping costs produces enough conversion to justify the expense. If free shipping works economically, make the threshold and terms easy to understand. The goal isn’t to hide costs. It’s to make them clear before the shopper reaches the final step.
The payment screen has one job: help the shopper finish the transaction with confidence. Use recognizable payment logos, visible security cues and clear information about accepted payment methods. If your platform uses an SSL-secured connection, make that trust signal easy to recognize without cluttering the page.
Mobile performance matters just as much. A shopper who has already encountered friction elsewhere in the checkout process shouldn’t have to wait for a slow payment page to load. Delays, errors and difficult mobile interactions compound the other problems shoppers have already faced.
Test the complete experience on an actual phone, not just on a desktop browser resized to a mobile viewport. Click through the form. Enter an address. Select a payment method. Look at the page via a normal cellular connection. You’re looking for anything that makes the shopper wonder, “Why is this so difficult?” Fix those points first.
Even after you improve the checkout process, some shoppers will still leave. That’s where cart abandonment recovery begins.
The DIY version is straightforward: set up a recovery flow, make the messages useful and measure the revenue they recover. The managed version goes further by connecting the flow to segmentation, customer behavior, channel selection and retargeting.
Timing matters because the longer you wait to follow up, the less likely shoppers are to return.
Klaviyo’s current 2026 abandoned-cart benchmarks suggest a sequence beginning with an email two to four hours after abandonment, followed by additional messages over the next 24 to 48 hours. Klaviyo also recommends testing the timing, rather than assuming one schedule will work for every business. That gives you a practical starting point without turning your inbox strategy into a customer-alienating barrage.
The first message should be a reminder, not a hard sell. If the shopper doesn’t return, a second message can provide additional information or, where the economics make sense, an incentive. A final message can point to related products or give the shopper another reason to return.
SMS adds another channel when the shopper has properly opted in. But more messages aren’t automatically better. The goal is to create a short recovery sequence that matches the shopper’s level of intent.
A good abandoned-cart email doesn’t need a clever gimmick. It needs to make returning to the purchase easy. Start with the product the shopper left behind and show it clearly. Remind the shopper why it was worth considering, then give them a direct path back to checkout. The call to action should take them where they need to go, not make them crawl through your site for the product again.
An incentive can help, but a discount isn’t necessarily the automatic answer. Klaviyo’s 2026 research specifically warns that repeated discounts often train shoppers to wait for an offer before buying. Its guidance recommends considering incentives selectively, including for higher-value carts where the additional revenue justifies the discount. That’s a margin question, not just a conversion question.
Therefore, a recovery strategy should measure more than whether someone clicked an email. It should tell you whether the additional sale was profitable after the cost of the incentive, messaging and acquisition channel.
For a deeper look at how these channels fit into the broader customer journey, see our ecommerce email marketing strategy [/blog/ecommerce-email-marketing-strategy/] page.
Email and SMS won’t reach every shopper who abandons a cart. Some shoppers just don’t open the message. Others may not have provided the information needed to receive it. Retargeting gives you another opportunity to reach shoppers who have already demonstrated purchase intent.
The basic DIY approach is to build an audience of shoppers who viewed or added products but did not purchase, then exclude those who completed the order. Keep the creative focused on the product; don’t follow the shopper around indefinitely.
This is also where the difference between a basic recovery setup and a managed strategy becomes more important. A managed Klaviyo flow plus retargeting build can coordinate the sequence across channels, apply exclusions, segment shoppers by behavior or cart value and test different timing and offers. Klaviyo’s 2026 analysis of more than 110,000 customers found that abandoned-cart flows generated the highest average revenue per recipient among its automated flows, at $6.77 for email and $4.48 for text messaging. Naturally, not every business will achieve those numbers. However, those numbers do show why cart recovery should be a revenue channel rather than an afterthought.
The DIY tips above can get a small operation moving. Once volume, customer segments and channel complexity increase, the work becomes less about sending reminders and more about managing the economics of recovery.
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Most cart abandonment is not inevitable. Some of it is simply shoppers browsing, but much of the preventable loss comes from problems you can identify and fix: unexpected costs, unnecessary form fields, forced account creation, weak trust signals and slow checkout experiences.
Start there. Improving the checkout process addresses the problem before you spend more money trying to recover it. Then build the recovery layer. A well-timed email and SMS sequence can bring back shoppers who still intend to buy. Retargeting gives you another opportunity when owned channels do not reach them.
The key is to treat recovery as a revenue decision, not a vanity-metric exercise. Track the sales recovered, the margin those sales produce and the cost of the incentives and channels used to generate them. If you’re looking for a way to manage the full recovery strategy, including building and managing the Klaviyo flow, segmentation and retargeting layer for you, an ecommerce digital marketing agency [/industries/ecommerce/] takes that work beyond the DIY setup.
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There’s no single “normal” rate that tells you whether your store is performing well. Baymard Institute currently reports an average abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 studies. Your own trends are more useful, however: watch abandonment by device, traffic source, product category and checkout step to find where shoppers are dropping out.
Klaviyo’s current guidance suggests starting with a reminder about two to four hours after abandonment, then following with additional messages over the next day or two. The exact timing should be tested with your customers, product categories and purchase cycles. Avoid sending emails so quickly that the messages feel intrusive.
Don’t judge the flow by open rates alone. Track completed purchases and revenue recovered, then account for discounts, channel costs and other expenses. Revenue Analytics should show whether the flow is generating incremental revenue at an acceptable margin, not simply whether people are reading their emails.
It can. Discounts may recover some orders, but giving every abandoning shopper an offer can reduce margin, since it teaches customers to wait for a discount. Klaviyo recommends testing incentives selectively, including by cart value. The goal is to recover profitable demand, not buy every conversion.
You can handle a basic recovery process manually at very low volume, but automation becomes more valuable as cart volume grows. A platform like Klaviyo triggers messages based on shopper behavior, manages sequences and connects email and SMS activity to revenue. The DIY approach works for a small number of abandoned carts. Automated flows let you send the right messages to more shoppers without managing each recovery manually.
