Product

Checkout that doesn't lose the sale: what to review first

70% of carts are abandoned before purchase. Most of that loss isn't price — it's checkout friction you can fix in weeks.

August 11, 2026|6 min read

Cart abandonment is not about price

The Baymard Institute documents an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 different studies. It's tempting to read that number as "customers thought it was too expensive" and stop there. In practice, much of the loss happens after the customer has already decided to buy — inside the checkout flow itself.

When the right product is already in the cart and the sale still slips away, the problem isn't the offer. It's friction: how many clicks, how many fields, how many surprises stand between the cart and a confirmed order.

The friction points that cost the most sales

According to the same Baymard research, excluding people who were just browsing, the most cited reasons for abandonment are: extra costs at checkout being too high (shipping, tax, fees) at 40%, delivery being too slow at 20%, distrust in providing card information at 19%, a required account creation at 18%, and a checkout process that is too long or complicated at 17%.

None of these points require redesigning the product. They're all flow decisions: when total cost is shown, whether an account is mandatory, how many screens sit between "cart" and "order confirmed".

What to review first

Before any visual redesign, it's worth measuring three things: exactly which checkout step customers exit from, whether total cost appears before payment details are requested, and whether a guest checkout path exists. Those three points alone address most of the abandonment reasons listed above.

After that, review the number of required fields, how visible the return/exchange policy is inside checkout, and how many payment methods are available — the next reasons on the list, lower weight but still relevant.

The size of the opportunity

Baymard estimates $260 billion in recoverable orders through better checkout design alone, across US and EU ecommerce — equivalent to up to a 35.26% conversion gain among the major retailers analyzed. That number won't map 1:1 onto every operation, but it shows the order of magnitude: checkout usually deserves more investment than it gets.

Where Diglion comes in

Diglion reviews the checkout funnel end to end — from cart to confirmed order — to identify where friction is costing sales and prioritize fixes by impact, not guesswork.