No matter how much traffic you drive to your online store, if shoppers get stuck at checkout, your opportunity to acquire a new customer and its order is lost. Here, we’ve compiled for you the latest stats and reasons for cart abandonment. We also reveal what best performers do when it comes to maximizing checkout conversion, so you can apply their best practices.
Ready? Set… Go!

$1 Trillion lost annual because of Cart Abandonment

• $236Bn were lost due to online shoppers abandoning their cart in Q1 2018, according to Pymnts.com1. That’s over $1 Trillion annualized (with Q4 being a much bigger quarter with Holidays shopping)
• 7 out of 10 visitors abandon their basket based on a consensus of studies.

In this article we will rely on robust sources of information that will provide the perspective from two complementary angles:

1. Consumer insights

“Why do online shoppers abandon checkout?” This question has been asked for the last two years in a survey to over 1,000 US adults in 2016 and almost 1,800 US adults in 2017.
The sample size is big enough to be statistically significant and US online shoppers cover one of the biggest eCommerce market, although there might be slight nuanced in Europe.
The survey is carried out by the Baymard Institute 2   a Danish independent web usability research institute with prestigious clients including Walmart, eBay, Google, Lego, Visa, Microsoft, Adobe and many more.

2. Identifying Best Performing online merchants and what they have in common

Once you understand what is making consumers act a certain way, you need to turn insights into actions. Here, we offer inspiration from online stores that have been identified as performing the best in converting customers at checkout.
The statistics come from PYMNTS.com, the #1 site for the payments industry by traffic and the premier source of information about “What’s Next” in payments and commerce. They have been running a Checkout Conversion Index (CCI) since  Q4 2015.
Their methodology is as follows:  the PYMNTS research team identified and collected data on 676 online merchants via three commercial channels: desktop, mobile and apps. It examined 74 variables present in the purchasing process through any or all three channels, then used a calculation system which weighed features that drive sales — including payment options and free shipping, among others — in terms of importance. This data was then used to determine each merchant’s unique CCI score.

3. Spoiler alert

If we look carefully at both what consumers tell us and the best practice from webshops who are converting the best, we can find 3 top drivers for cart abandonment:

1. Speed
2. Unexpected cost
3. Form filling complexity

Read on for more details for each drivers and how to fight each of them like a Kung Fu master.

#1 Driver for Cart Abandonment: SPEED

How Speed impacts conversion

Here are the key statistics released by Akamai in April 2017 3:

• A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent
• A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent

What do best performers do?

Feature	Best Performers	Worst Performers
Time in Second to complete Checkout	119	184
Total Clicks to Checkout	17	25

 
Best performers have a checkout process that is 50% faster than worst performers with also 50% less clicks.

#2 Driver for Cart Abandonment: HIDDEN EXTRA COSTS including Shipping

What Online Consumers say?

The Baymard Institute askes over 1,000 US adults why they abandon their online purchase during checkout. Below are the latest results from 2017.

The ranking hasn’t changed from 2016. Only a few percentages shift from one year to the other, key improvement with less complaints around sites crashing but more complaints around being forced to create an account and trust to give away credit card information.

What do best performers do?

Feature	Best Performers	Worst Performers
Free Shipping	93.8%	66.7%

One way to avoid unexpected extra costs is to offer Free Shipping if your business model allows it. Free shipping and free returns are now becoming the norm and are highly expected in certain markets like Germany.
Another way to avoid the bad surprise is to display upfront the order total including shipping costs and additional fees.
It would look like this:

#3 Driver for Cart Abandonment: FORM FILLING COMPLEXITY

Studies have shown how removing unnecessary fields in your checkout form have a positive impact on your conversion rate.
And when we ask online shoppers, they feel the same: almost one in free shoppers abandon their carts because the checkout process was too complicated. It makes sense: we are all time poor!  How many times have you been interrupted in the middle of the process or voluntarily procrastinated to fill out those long boring forms?

The second barrier to completing checkout is forcing visitors to create a account. In 2016, 35% quoted it as the reason for abandoning their cart and in 2017 it increased to 37% of respondents. We can’t recommend enough to allow:

• Guest checkout
• Simple sign up in the flow of the checkout with just an extra password field

Here is an example of what the simple and non compulsory registration experience looks like. This principle applies both to B2C and B2B:

What do best performers do?

Feature	Best Performers	Worst Performers
Customer Profile Required	0%	68.6%
Shipping same as Billing	100%	43.8%

Best performers remove friction and make it easy, simple and fast for their customers to checkout.
Note than none of the top performers require a customer profile.
On the other hand all of best performers  allow customers to tick a box and not retype their address twice if the Shipping and billing addresses are the same.

Bottom Line

The faster, the more simple and the most transparent checkout, the better.
Remember, with only 3 out 10 visitors completing checkout on average, each additional checkout completion increases your bottom line by 1 divided by 3  i.e. 33%.
Hope you’ll smash it and be among the best performers next quarter!