Roughly 70% of online shopping carts get abandoned. That figure comes from Baymard Institute, which has aggregated dozens of studies over more than a decade, and it has barely moved in twenty years.
Think about what that means for your budget. You pay for every click that lands on your product page. Seven out of ten people who get far enough to add something to a cart still walk away, and most of them do it for reasons you could fix this month.
The problem is rarely the traffic. It is what happens on three or four pages after the click.
The product page is answering the wrong questions
Most product pages are written like catalogue entries. Dimensions, materials, a bullet list of features. What the buyer actually wants to know is whether this will work for them, when it will arrive, and what happens if it is wrong.
Baymard's testing found that missing or unclear delivery information is one of the most common causes of hesitation on product pages. Shoppers do not want to click through to a separate shipping policy page to find out if something arrives before the weekend. They want it on screen, next to the price.
The same goes for returns. If your returns policy is generous, say so on the product page in plain words. If it is buried in the footer, it may as well not exist. Put the answer where the doubt happens, not three clicks away.
One practical test. Open your best-selling product page on a phone and count how many scrolls it takes to find delivery time, return terms, and total cost. If it is more than one, you have found a leak.
Hidden costs are the single biggest killer
Baymard's research consistently lists unexpected extra costs as the number one reason for cart abandonment, cited by roughly half of people who abandon. Shipping, tax, handling fees, all revealed at the final step.
This is a self-inflicted wound. The shopper has already decided to buy. They have entered their details. Then the total jumps and the deal feels dishonest, so they close the tab.
Show the full cost early. A shipping estimator on the product page, a clear threshold for free delivery, or simply building shipping into the price. Sites that make the total obvious upfront lose fewer people at the final step, even when the number is higher, because nobody feels caught out.
The second biggest offender is forced account creation. Making someone register before they can pay adds friction at the exact moment they are ready to hand over money. Guest checkout is not a nice-to-have.
Your checkout has too many steps and too many exits
Every extra field is a chance to lose someone. Baymard found the average US checkout has around 11 form fields when it could comfortably run on six or seven.
Look at what you are asking for and be honest about whether you need it. Company name, second address line, phone number, how did you hear about us. Each one is a small tax on completion, and you are charging it to people who already want to buy.
Then look at what else is on the page. Navigation menus, promo banners, newsletter popups, links to your blog. A checkout page has one job. Anything that offers an escape route is working against you.
Page speed matters here too. Google's research found that the probability of a bounce rises 32% when load time goes from one second to three seconds. Checkout pages are often the heaviest on the site because of payment scripts and tracking tags. That is the worst possible place for a delay.
You are treating every visitor the same
Here is the mistake underneath all the others. Your pages are static, and your visitors are not.
Someone who has visited four times and read your comparison page needs something different from someone who landed from a paid ad ninety seconds ago. One needs reassurance on price. The other needs to understand what you sell. Serving both the same page means serving neither well.
This is where behaviour beats guesswork. The signals are already there in how people move, pause, scroll and hesitate. Pounce watches those signals in real time, reads what a visitor is actually trying to do, and acts at the moment it matters instead of showing the same message to everyone.
Start with the page that carries the most revenue, not the page with the worst percentage. A checkout page with a 65% drop-off and 10,000 monthly visitors is losing you far more than a landing page with an 80% drop-off and 300 visitors. Do the multiplication before you do the work.
Fix the leaks and the same traffic starts paying for itself. That is cheaper than buying more of it.