As online retailers figure out how to increase conversion rates in 2025, conversations often turn to why people abandon carts on merchants’ ecommerce sites. And the answers are not always easy to pin down.
New survey data in Digital Commerce 360’s 2025 Ecommerce Conversion Report shows how common cart abandonment during checkout really is. And the report offers some good news.
In the 2025 edition of this annual survey, a greater share of respondents said they had never abandoned a cart (8.4%) than in the year before. That response rate was up more than three points from 5.3% in 2024. And the response rate for the same answer was as low as 2.5% as recently as 2022.
As for the 91.6% of shoppers who still leave unpurchased items in their carts, here is a look at what is going on in their heads.
Why people say they abandon carts during online checkout
Among shoppers who did report abandoning their carts on ecommerce sites, three reasons appeared more frequently than others in survey responses. As for the top two answers, one may be easier to address than the other, and that is that shipping costs made a total purchase cost more than the person expected (30.1%).
In that context, cart abandonment can be attributed to a larger issue, which boils down to clearly setting the right expectations for customers so that those expectations can be met — or exceeded — building trust and loyalty over time.
The third-most cited answer on the survey fell into this bucket as well: “My order did not qualify for free shipping” (26.6%). In those cases, it may have been possible for online merchants to make their bars for free shipping more obvious up front, saving shoppers from disappointment later on.
As for the other most common answer on the survey — “I wanted to save the cart for later as a convenience” (30.1%) — this may just be a behavior that retailers have to live with. However, those cases could potentially be addressed by follow-up communications with reminders about what was left behind.
Meeting expectations
Despite lower shares of shoppers leaving carts behind year over year, setting expectations appeared to be a lingering challenge in this year’s survey results.
Among answers that saw response rates increase from the previous year were examples that seemed to illustrate such problems. For example, ecommerce sites failing to accept gift cards (10.3%) increased by 3.4 points year over year.
Meanwhile, the rate of responses for sites lacking a guaranteed or estimated delivery date (13.0%) was also up. So was the share of shoppers who said they left a cart because the website loaded too slowly (9.3%). In all of the above cases, merchants should see opportunities to be clear early on and avoid surprises that chase customers away later on.
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