Read your checkout before you send another reminder email

Abandoned-cart emails are the easy answer to full carts and empty orders. They recover a little. The bigger gains are usually in the checkout itself: surprise costs, forced accounts, failing payments. Here is how to find them.

When an online store has plenty of visitors, plenty of full carts and not enough orders, the first suggestion is nearly always a reminder email. Every store platform has one built in. Switch it on and some customers come back.

It is worth having. But it treats every abandoned cart the same, and it does nothing about why people left. A customer who left because shipping was a surprise will leave again when the reminder brings them back to the same surprise.

Why people really leave

Published research on checkout abandonment has been consistent for years. The common reasons are:

Some carts are also never meant to become orders: people use them to compare or to save for later. That is normal and not worth chasing.

A reminder email brings the customer back to the same surprise that made them leave.

How to find your reasons

  1. Measure each step Track how many people reach each checkout step, split by phone and desktop. The biggest drop is where to look first.
  2. Try it yourself Buy something from your own store on a phone, as a new customer, with a card you have not saved. Write down every moment of hesitation.
  3. Watch five people Ask five customers, or friends who fit your customer, to buy something while you watch silently. Five is enough to find the big problems.
  4. Read the failures Your payment provider records declined and failed payments. A spike on one device or method is a bug, not a customer choice.
  5. Ask the leavers A one-question survey shown when someone leaves checkout: what stopped you today? The free-text answers are gold.

Fixes that usually pay

Show delivery costs and dates on the product page, not at the last step. Offer guest checkout. Remove any field you do not need to fulfil the order. Add the payment methods your customers actually use. Make the order summary and the trust signals (returns policy, contact details, secure payment) visible without scrolling on a phone.

None of these are clever. All of them are measurable. Change one thing at a time where you can, and compare the step-by-step numbers before and after.

Then the reminders

Once the checkout is fixed, reminders do better, because the customer comes back to a smoother path. They also do better when they fit the reason: a cart abandoned at the shipping step might get a note about the free-delivery threshold, a cart abandoned at payment might get a link that goes straight back to it.

Always measure reminders against a small group who do not receive them. Without that, it is impossible to tell how many of those customers would have come back anyway.

What it could be worth

Questions people ask

What is a normal cart abandonment rate?

Baymard's average across 50 studies is about 70%. Your own number matters less than where in the checkout people stop.

Should I turn off abandoned cart emails?

No. Fix the checkout first, then keep reminders and measure them against a group that gets none.

  1. Cart abandonment rate statistics, Baymard Institute (2025)

Do the phone test today. Buy one thing from your own store on your phone, as a new customer. If anything made you hesitate, it is making your customers hesitate too.

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