Most conversion gains come from removing reasons to leave; adding reasons to buy comes second. Show the full cost early, deliver fast and say when, let people pay as guests with the method they prefer, make the pages fast, and answer the questions shoppers ask before they ask them.
If you can test only three things this quarter: shipping and delivery shown on the product page, guest checkout with fewer fields, and the speed of the product and checkout templates on a phone.
Why shoppers leave, in their own words
Baymard Institute's running average of 50 studies from 2006 to 2025 puts the cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, and the figure has hovered near 70% for more than a decade. Baymard's own survey of US shoppers found that 42% had abandoned a cart because they were just browsing, which is part of how people shop and not a problem to fix. Among the rest, the reasons are specific: 40% said extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees were too high, 20% that delivery was too slow, 19% that they did not trust the site with their card details, 18% that the site wanted them to create an account, 17% that the checkout was too long or complicated, 17% that the site had errors or crashed, 13% that the returns policy was not satisfactory, 12% that they could not see or work out the total cost up front, 10% that the card was declined, and 9% that there were too few payment methods.
Read that list as a work order. Each reason maps to a page and a fix, and the fixes below follow the list's order of weight.
Product page: decide the sale before the cart
The product page is where the shopper decides, so the information that drives the top abandonment reasons belongs here, above the add-to-cart button or beside it.
- Shipping cost and delivery date, stated for the shopper's likely location, with the free-shipping threshold if one exists. This answers the largest fixable reason to leave.
- Returns in one sentence, with the window and who pays, and a link to the full policy.
- Payment methods and security, as the logos your buyers recognize, near the button.
- Price, stock and variants clear at a glance, with the variant selector showing what is in stock before it is chosen.
- Photos that answer questions: scale, texture, the back, the product in use, and a short video where it helps. Zoom that works on a phone.
- The questions shoppers ask, answered on the page in a short block, drawn from reviews, customer service and the search terms people use on the site.
- Genuine reviews with the full distribution of ratings shown and the newest first, collected within the US and Canadian rules on fake and incentivized reviews.
Cart: a summary, not a sales floor
The cart's job is to confirm and move on. Show the items with photos, quantities that can be changed in place, the subtotal, the shipping estimate and the taxes where you can, so the total is no surprise at checkout. Put one clear button to checkout at the top and the bottom, show the payment and express options, and keep promotions out unless they help the shopper finish. A discount code box placed prominently sends people away to search for a code; tuck it behind a link.
Checkout: fewer fields, guest first, nothing hidden
Baymard's checkout research gives the measure: an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements, 7 to 8 if only fields are counted, yet the average US checkout displays 23.48 elements by default. Shorten yours to what you need to take the money and deliver the goods, and in that order of priority.
- Offer guest checkout first, and the option to create an account after the order, with the details already filled.
- Ask for the email first, so that a checkout rescue email can follow if the shopper leaves.
- Use address lookup and a single name field; remove the optional fields that nobody needs.
- Show the full total, with shipping and taxes, before the payment step, and show the delivery date beside the shipping option.
- Offer the payment methods your buyers use, including the express wallets, and say why a card was declined in words the shopper can act on.
- Show security cues where the card details are typed, and state your business name, address and contact details on the page.
- Test the whole flow on a phone every week, after every app update, because errors and crashes are a top-ten reason to leave.
Speed is conversion
A slow store loses shoppers before any of the above is seen. Google's Core Web Vitals set the targets for a good experience: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Measure the product, cart and checkout templates separately on a phone, fix the heaviest images and the apps that load on every page, and reserve space for prices, badges and reviews so the button does not jump as the page loads. Our ecommerce SEO checklist covers the speed checks in detail.
How to test on a store
Testing is how you learn which fix worked rather than guessing. Three rules fit most stores. First, test one change at a time, so that the result has one cause. Second, measure the test on orders and revenue per visitor, and never on clicks or add-to-carts alone, because a change that raises add-to-carts and lowers orders is a loss. Third, run each test long enough to cover a full buying cycle and enough orders to be sure; a store with a few hundred orders a month can test big changes such as guest checkout or shipping display, and should skip tests on button colors that would need months to read.
Where traffic is too low for a split test, run before-and-after comparisons over matched periods, keep a dated log of every change, and read the funnel in your analytics: product page to cart, cart to checkout, checkout to order. The step with the largest drop is the next thing to fix.
What to measure each month
Conversion rate by device and by traffic source, revenue per visitor, average order value, the three funnel steps above, cart and checkout abandonment, the share of orders from returning customers, and the Core Web Vitals of the three templates. Read them together: a higher conversion rate with a lower average order value may be a loss, and a conversion rate that rises only on desktop points to a phone problem. Pair the page fixes with the email flows in our guide to ecommerce email marketing, which recover the shoppers the pages still lose.
If you want it done for you
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our conversion rate optimization page covers the work on store pages, from the read-through to the tests, and our ecommerce website design page covers the store build when the fixes need a new template rather than a patch.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.