Cart abandonment and checkout optimisation: stop losing orders at the last step

The ad budget is being spent, product pages get traffic, the add-to-basket report looks busy. Orders, though, are flat. The abandoned baskets list in your admin grows every day and nobody knows why those people walked away.

This guide covers those last few metres between the basket and the "Pay now" button: guest checkout, forms and addresses, delivery costs, the payment methods UK, EU and US shoppers expect, Strong Customer Authentication, mobile, trust, consent for basket reminders and the funnel tracking that shows where you lose people.

Why do shoppers abandon checkout?

First, some honesty: many people who abandon a basket were never going to buy that day. Price comparers and people saving items for later exist in every shop, and you cannot bring that to zero.

The part you control is bigger than most teams think. Baymard Institute, known for its large-scale usability research, surveys online shoppers on why they abandon during checkout, and the leading reasons have stayed remarkably stable for years:

• Extra costs such as delivery, tax or fees were higher than expected
• Delivery was too slow
• They did not trust the site with their card details
• The site wanted them to create an account
• Checkout was too long or complicated
• The site had errors or crashed
• The returns policy was not good enough
• They could not see or calculate the total cost upfront
• Their card was declined
• There were not enough payment methods

What stands out is that almost none of these are about the product. The customer wants it. What stops them is surprise, effort or doubt, and the rest of this guide takes those three on one at a time.

Guest checkout, forms and addresses

Drop the forced account

Forcing account creation is one of the most expensive habits in e-commerce. The reasoning is understandable: account holders come back, the email list grows. For the customer, though, setting a password, confirming an email address and managing yet another account on a first purchase is pure friction.

The fix is simple. Offer guest checkout on the first screen, at least as prominently as sign-in. Turning "Continue as guest" into a small grey link at the bottom of the page is forced registration in disguise.

Move account creation to after the order. Saying "Want to save these details? Just choose a password" on the confirmation page brings in more accounts than blocking the way beforehand, because the customer has already given you their name, address and email.

Make sign-in easier for those who want it, too. A one-time code sent by email or text loses fewer orders than a forgotten password and a reset email that takes five minutes to arrive. Express options such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or Shop Pay on the basket page let returning shoppers skip the form almost entirely.

Cut the fields

Every field in a checkout form says "one more thing". Baymard's checkout benchmarking repeatedly finds that many shops show far more form fields than they actually need. Start by asking of every field: can we really not deliver the order without this?

• Ask for the full name in one field, or at least put first and last name on the same line.
• Delivery and billing addresses are the same for most orders. Make "Billing address same as delivery" ticked by default. WCAG 2.2's success criterion on redundant entry asks for exactly this.
• Show company name and VAT number fields only when the customer chooses to buy as a business.
• Take date of birth, gender and "how did you hear about us?" out of checkout. If you want to know, ask after the order.
• Hide the discount code field behind a link. A large, open promo box sends customers without a code off to search for one, and some never return.

Make the address easy

Use postcode lookup with a clearly visible option to enter the address manually. Lookup services save a lot of typing in the UK, but they fail for new-build addresses, flats with unusual numbering and many international addresses, and a customer stuck with no manual option leaves. For international orders, adapt the form to the country: not every country has states, counties or postcodes in the same format.

Do not break the browser's autofill. Give fields the correct autocomplete values (name, email, tel, address-line1, postal-code and so on), open a numeric keypad for phone and card fields and an email keyboard for the email field. Accept phone numbers with or without spaces and country codes; let the code tidy the formatting, not the customer.

Show error messages directly beneath the field, in a sentence that says what to do. Not "Invalid input" but "Enter a UK mobile number, for example 07700 900123". And above all, never wipe the rest of the form when one field has an error.

Delivery costs and the total price: remove the surprise

Unexpected extra costs top the abandonment list. The cure is not necessarily free delivery; it is early information. If customers learn the delivery cost, delivery date and returns policy on the product page, nothing surprises them at checkout.

Show an estimated delivery date on product pages ("Order within 3 hours for delivery on Thursday"), show how far the basket is from your free delivery threshold if you have one, and summarise the returns policy in a sentence. If you can show an estimated delivery cost in the basket before asking for a postcode, do.

There is a legal side to this as well. Under the EU Consumer Rights Directive and, in the UK, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, customers must see the total price including taxes and any delivery charges before they order, and the final button has to make clear that clicking it means paying, as in "order with obligation to pay" or an equally unambiguous phrase such as "Buy now" or "Pay now". Extra paid options need the customer's express consent, so a pre-ticked gift wrap or insurance box is not allowed.

In the UK the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 tightened the rules on drip pricing: mandatory charges must be included in the headline price, and the CMA's price transparency guidance explains how it treats delivery and other charges. In the EU, any consumer who has a right of withdrawal must, since 19 June 2026, also be able to cancel online through a clearly labelled withdrawal function. That sits outside the checkout itself but belongs on the same project list.

Payment methods: what shoppers expect

"Not enough payment methods" sits lower on the list, but for an individual customer it is decisive: if their preferred method is missing, they leave.

In the UK and most of Europe, debit and credit cards plus Apple Pay and Google Pay are the baseline, and PayPal is still expected by many shoppers. Wallets matter most on mobile: they fill in the card details, often the address too, and authenticate with the phone's biometrics. Local methods differ by market. Customers in the Netherlands expect iDEAL, in Belgium Bancontact, in Poland BLIK, and in Germany many shoppers want to pay by invoice or with PayPal. Opening the same checkout unchanged in every market is one of the most common mistakes we see in cross-border selling.

Buy now, pay later deserves a specific note. Since 15 July 2026 most BNPL in the UK, now called deferred payment credit, has been regulated by the FCA. The lender carries out the affordability checks, but how you describe BNPL on product and checkout pages matters, so use the wording your provider approves. In the EU, the revised Consumer Credit Directive applies from 20 November 2026 and brings most third-party BNPL into its scope.

Do not add surcharges for paying by card. In the UK, surcharges on consumer card payments have been banned since January 2018, and the ban also covers services such as PayPal; in the EU, surcharges on consumer cards are prohibited under the second Payment Services Directive. In the US the rules vary by state and card scheme.

Strong Customer Authentication and 3D Secure

In the EEA and the UK, most online card payments need Strong Customer Authentication under PSD2: two of something the customer knows, has or is. In practice this means 3D Secure 2, where the bank confirms the payment through its app, a one-time code or biometrics. It has applied to e-commerce across the EEA since the end of the 2020 migration period and in the UK since 14 March 2022.

SCA does not have to mean a challenge on every order. The rules include exemptions, for example for low-value payments, for transactions your payment provider's risk analysis rates as low risk, and for merchant-initiated payments such as subscription renewals. Whether an exemption is applied is ultimately the issuing bank's decision, and the liability for fraud can shift to you when it is. Ask your payment service provider which exemptions it requests on your behalf.

Most of the friction comes from the design around the challenge, not from 3D Secure itself:

• Tell customers what is about to happen: "Your bank may ask you to confirm this payment in its app."
• Show a loading state while the bank screen opens, not a blank page.
• If the code arrives late or the challenge fails, let the customer return to a basket and form that are still filled in.
• When a card is declined, do not just say "Payment failed". Translate the decline reason into plain language where your provider passes it on, and offer another card or method on the same screen.

Track the payment success rate, meaning the share of initiated payments that are authorised, broken down by card type, issuing country and payment method. A sudden drop for one card brand or country is usually an integration or issuer problem, not your shop, and that data is what you need for the conversation with your provider.

Mobile checkout and trust

If most of your traffic is on phones, the desktop checkout design is a secondary concern. Test the checkout first on a phone, one-handed, on a slow mobile connection. A page that works fine on office Wi-Fi can stall on a train.

Things to get right on mobile:

• A single-column form, large tap targets and fields that are not hidden behind the keyboard.
• An order summary (items, quantity, total) available at every step in a collapsible panel.
• A pay button that stays visible at the bottom of the screen.
• No pop-ups, chat bubbles or newsletter overlays during checkout. Checkout does not sell; it completes a sale.
• A numeric keypad for card numbers and automatic formatting of the expiry date.

Accessibility belongs here too. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce services sold to consumers in the EU, and an inaccessible checkout is the most direct way to fall foul of it. Labels on every field, visible focus states, errors that are announced to screen readers and no time limits on entering card details are the minimum.

On trust, a wall of badges does little. What works is concrete information: which payment provider processes the card details, contact details including a phone number that are easy to find, a one-line summary of the returns policy and your company details. Consistent design helps as well. A checkout that suddenly looks different, or shows a domain the customer does not recognise, makes people nervous.

Basket reminder emails and consent

A reminder sent a few hours after a basket is abandoned wins back part of the lost orders. Before you send one, though, sort out the consent position for each market you sell into.

In the UK, PECR allows the soft opt-in for marketing emails to people whose details you collected "in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale", provided you gave them a clear chance to opt out at the point of collection and in every message, and only for your own similar products. Whether an abandoned basket counts as negotiations is debated; the safer reading is that it can, if the email address was entered during checkout with an unticked opt-out shown right there. In the EU the equivalent exception is read more narrowly in some member states. In Germany, for example, the prevailing view is that basket reminders need prior consent, because no sale has taken place. In the US, CAN-SPAM does not require prior consent for email but does require a working unsubscribe and accurate sender details.

Two rules apply everywhere. Do not use tools that capture an email address as it is typed, before the form is submitted; that is hard to defend under UK GDPR and the EU GDPR. And keep reminders genuinely useful, with one, at most two, messages rather than a week-long sequence.

Tracking the funnel: where are you losing orders?

Improvements made without knowing where you lose people are guesses. Send GA4's e-commerce events completely: view_item, add_to_cart, view_cart, begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase. Then open the checkout report in the Monetisation section, which shows how many people who began checkout reached the shipping, payment and purchase steps. For your own step definitions, build a funnel exploration in Explore and split it by device category; mobile and desktop rarely lose people at the same step.

Numbers tell you where the problem is; session recordings tell you why. Watching real checkout sessions in tools such as Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar settles in ten minutes what a design meeting can argue about for hours. Make sure card and personal data fields are masked in the recordings, and that the tool only runs with the consent your cookie banner records.

Where to start

Do not try to change everything in a week. Measure, fix the biggest loss, measure again.

1. Check that GA4 is receiving every e-commerce event and pull the last 30 days of checkout funnel data by device.
2. Go through checkout yourself on a phone, as a guest, from start to finish, and note every point where you hesitate.
3. Make guest checkout prominent and move account creation after the order.
4. Question every form field and fix autocomplete values, postcode lookup fallback and the billing address default.
5. Move delivery cost, delivery date and a returns summary onto the product page, and check your pricing against drip pricing rules.
6. Add the wallets and local methods your markets expect and remove any card surcharges.
7. Review consent for basket reminders market by market before switching them on.
8. Watch checkout recordings weekly and compare the funnel month on month after each change.

At AYTE Digital we work on checkout from tracking set-up and form design to payment provider integration and the technical side of consumer law requirements. We can look at your store's funnel with you and talk through where the biggest losses are.