WooCommerce Cart Abandonment: How to Make Your Store Easy and Fast to Shop

WooCommerce cart abandonment is the number every store owner eventually looks up, and it's usually higher than they hoped. Baymard Institute pooled 50 studies and found that 70.22% of online carts are abandoned^[1]. Some of those shoppers were only browsing. A good share of the rest were slowed down by the store itself.

This post covers the parts of a WooCommerce store that decide whether a shopper finishes: how they move around, how the cart and checkout behave, how fast the pages load on a phone, and what the store sends them afterwards. Every example comes from a WooCommerce store we run, connected to Square.

What shoppers give as the reason they left

Baymard keeps a running list of the reasons shoppers give when they abandon a cart at checkout. Read it as a to-do list for your store, because most of it sits in your hands^[1].

Add the 17% who hit errors or a crash, and the 12% who couldn't see the total cost up front, and the pattern is plain. Shoppers leave when the store makes them do work, hides a number, or breaks. The fixes below are all ways of taking that work off them.

Continue shopping that puts the customer back where they were

Boostable exclusive Picture a shopper forty products down a category page. They add one to the cart and tap Continue shopping. On a standard store they land at the top of page one and have to scroll all the way down again. Plenty don't bother.

We built the step that fixes it. The store remembers how far down each shop and category page the shopper scrolled. Continue shopping, on the cart page and in the side cart, sends them back to that page and that spot. If they'd loaded more products with a Load More button, it takes them back to that point too.

It remembers per browser tab and saves nothing on product, cart or checkout pages. If there's nothing saved, Continue shopping sends the customer to your shop page, so the button always goes somewhere sensible. For a store with a long catalogue, this one change makes buying a second and third item feel easy.

A side cart that keeps them shopping

When a shopper presses Add to cart, the store opens a side cart and leaves the page where it is. There's no jump to a separate cart page and no wait for a reload. They can see what's in the cart and carry on.

The side cart carries three buttons: View Cart, Checkout and Continue browsing. Each one maps to something a shopper might want next, so nobody has to hunt for the way forward. Under them sits a tap-to-call line, "Need help? Call us", for the shopper who wants to ask a question before paying. On a phone, a real person one tap away is a strong reason to stay.

The side cart also shows each customer only what applies to them. A store that sells to the public and to trade accounts can hide the free-shipping bar from wholesale customers, whose postage works differently. Small touches like that stop a customer wondering whether a message is meant for them.

From cart to checkout without a loop

On the checkout page, the shopper who spots a mistake needs a way back. We give them a small text link above the subtotal: "Need to change your cart items? Go back to shopping cart". It's a quiet link, so the pay button stays the main thing on the page, and anyone who needs to edit the cart still has an obvious route.

Boostable exclusive The checkout also remembers what the customer has typed. Details entered in the checkout fields stay saved for 48 hours, for guests and for logged-in customers. A shopper who gets a phone call, switches apps or loses signal comes back to a form that's still filled in. Pressing Enter no longer places the order by accident, either, so a stray tap on a phone keyboard doesn't submit half a form.

Baymard counted the form fields in current checkouts. The average in 2024 was 11.3, and most sites need only 8^[2]. Count yours. Every field you can remove, pre-fill or make optional is one fewer thing between the shopper and the pay button.

That last line matters more than it looks. A retail customer sees cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay and PayPal. A wholesale customer on a trade account sees the options that suit trade: bank transfer, or the pay by invoice we described in a separate post. Showing each customer the payment methods that apply is faster than asking them to pick through ones that don't.

Payment buttons deserve the same attention. A shopper who pays with a wallet on their phone skips typing a card number, an address and a name. Offering the wallets your customers already use, and hiding the ones that don't suit a given customer type, shortens the last step of the sale.

"Highly recommended Tamhas. The whole website construction process was made easy and the result is professional, functional and easy to use. Back up service has been a well appreciated bonus for us too."

Kevin Hill ★★★★★ Verified Google review

Fast on a phone

Google's own research found that 53% of mobile visits are likely to be abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load^[5]. A shop page full of product photos is exactly the kind of page that can run past that.

Google publishes three targets for a page that feels fast. They're measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, across mobile and desktop^[3].

Google's guidance on the first of those is practical. Deliver the first piece of the page as fast as possible, start loading the biggest image early, and serve resources with an efficient cache policy so repeat visits come from the cache^[4]. That is what we build into a store:

• Pages served from a cache. A shopper who opens a page the store has already prepared gets it almost at once, because the store doesn't rebuild it for every visit.
• Scripts only where they're used. Payment, review and login scripts load on the pages that need them, so a category page carries less.
• Fewer, combined stylesheets. Dozens of small style files become a handful, which means fewer requests before the page can appear.
• Images sized for where they appear. A thumbnail loads as a thumbnail, and the larger photo loads when the shopper wants it.

"We are an insurance brokerage based in Hong Kong. Tamhas and his team did a wonderful job revamping our website and increasing our contact with prospects. Business boomed as a result and we started getting more and more enquiries for less and less outlay. Top job, lightning fast website and excellent customer care."

Marc Meldrum ★★★★★ Verified Google review

Speed is also something you can test without any tools. Open your store on a phone, away from your office wifi, and tap through a category, a product and the cart. If anything makes you wait, a customer waited too. Fix the slowest page first. Large images and scripts that load on every page are the usual suspects, and both are fixed in the store, not by asking customers to be patient.

The emails that do the chasing

Not every shopper finishes in one visit, and not every finished order ends there. Four emails carry the rest of the work, and your team writes none of them by hand.

The abandoned cart sequence

A shopper adds items, gets distracted and leaves. A short run of emails brings them back. We set the timing to suit the store. The first can go within 15 minutes, or after an hour. A second follows later the same day, and a third a day after. Our own store runs this sequence at one hour, two hours and one day.

The emails read as a personal note from a real name, with a button back to the cart, instead of a no-reply banner. A discount code on a later email is optional, and you can leave it off if your margins are tight. Your own staff and test addresses are excluded, so you never chase yourself.

Tracking, before the order is closed

Boostable exclusive When an order ships, the customer gets a panel at the top of the email with the courier's name, the tracking number as a link, and a Track your parcel button. The same panel shows on the order page in their account. No customer has to write in to ask where their parcel is.

We also built the gate behind it. Your team can't mark an order Completed until a courier and a tracking number are entered, or they've ticked that there's none. Staff choose Update or Update and Notify, so the customer is only emailed when you want them to be. The email can't go out empty.

The review request

About a week after an order is marked Completed, retail customers get a short email asking how you did, with a button that goes straight to your Google review page. Trade accounts aren't asked, because a wholesale buyer reordering through an account is a different relationship from a one-off retail shopper. Google reviews feed the stars shoppers see next to your listing. If you'd like that running for your business without a WooCommerce build, our free review system does the same job with a QR card in the parcel.

Wholesale postage

For trade customers, the cart shows "Shipping cost to be confirmed" and explains that a separate shipping invoice follows. Your team adds the courier and the cost, and the invoice is emailed. We cover that whole flow in the pay by invoice post.

Three ways stores make shopping harder than it needs to be

1. Hiding the total until the last step. Extra costs are the top reason on Baymard's list, at 40%, and 12% of shoppers said they couldn't see or work out the total cost up front^[1]. Show postage early, or say how it will be worked out.
2. Making an account compulsory. 18% of shoppers in Baymard's list left because the site wanted them to create one^[1]. Offer an account as a choice after the order, not a toll before it.
3. Judging the store on a desktop. Most of the problems above only show up on a phone, in the middle of a distracted afternoon. Test there. Google puts the average mobile load time at 19 seconds over a 3G connection^[5], so a signal that drops mid-checkout is the normal case for plenty of shoppers.

Why small steps add up

None of these changes is dramatic on its own. A scroll position, a text link, a saved form, a second email. Each one removes a small moment where a shopper might have stopped. A catalogue of hundreds of products and a customer who shops on a phone between other jobs make those moments frequent. Taking out a handful of them is often worth more than a redesign, because the shopper still finds a store they recognise, only easier.

That's also why the order matters. Fix the paths shoppers use most, such as the category page, the cart and the checkout, before anything cosmetic. Measure the speed on the pages that carry the most visits. Then let the emails catch the people who still leave.

What it takes to set up

None of this needs a new store. It runs on the WooCommerce store you have, or the one we build you, and the Square connection carries on behind it. We start by shopping your store the way a customer does: on a phone, from a category page, through to a paid order.

Getting more shoppers to the store is a separate job, and it's the one our Boostable SEO does. A store that's easy to shop makes every one of those visitors worth more, which is why it comes first.

The short version

Seven in ten online carts are abandoned^[1], and most of the reasons shoppers give sit with the store. A WooCommerce store that remembers where the customer was, keeps the side cart and checkout simple, loads fast on a phone and follows up by email gives more of them a reason to finish. Continue shopping returns to the same spot. The checkout keeps what's typed. Tracking, reviews and abandoned cart emails go out on their own. We shop your store on a phone first, then build what it needs.