Plugging Revenue Leaks (How to Stop Potential Sales Slipping Away)

70% of your carts don't convert. Here's how to fix it.

Author

Pietro Saccomani
February 27, 2025

On average, only 2% of your site visitors convert, yet 7-8% add a product to their cart.

The difference?

Around 70% of all carts that are left uncompleted.

Abandoned carts are the biggest, easiest to execute, and most profitable way to increase revenue right now.

It’s about converting more of the customers you’ve already paid to acquire.

Compared to full-scale CRO, cart abandonment is an immediately solvable problem: addressing people who were interested enough to add to cart, but not convinced enough to check out.

Fixing this is a high-leverage move delivering fast and measurable results:

  • More revenue (without spending more on ads)

  • Lower CAC (more conversions from the same ad spend)

  • Higher margins

  • Higher LTV

Below, we’ll walk through the only playbook you need to reduce revenue leaks and turn abandoned carts into recovered sales.

The Five Core Reasons Your Carts Don’t Convert (and How to Win Back Lost Revenue)

Want to fix cart abandonment? Find out why the customer hesitated.

They have some interest in the product, clearly.

What barrier was just strong enough to stop them from completing their purchase?

Any abandoned cart typically comes down to one (or more) of five core reasons:

  • Friction

  • Trust

  • Shipping

  • Cost

  • Intent

Once you diagnose these leaks in your cart funnel, you can fix them and see immediate impact.

Let’s break it all down.

Friction

Every extra step in your checkout flow is another opportunity for a customer to drop off.

Don’t make it feel like work for the customer. They should have to think as little as possible.

Checkout should feel effortless, not like an obstacle course.

  • Slow load times

  • Forced account creation

  • Unnecessary form fields

Don’t gate your checkout with a login screen. Just don’t.

All these things kill a potential sale.

If your abandoned cart rate is higher than expected, it’s highly likely your checkout flow is introducing friction that stops buyers in their tracks.

Shopify Checkout already does 90% of the heavy lifting—but even high-performing brands can refine the experience further.

If you’re not on Shopify, your goal should be to replicate what Shopify Checkout does. It’s the industry benchmark for a high-converting, low-friction experience.

Enable one-click payment options like Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Autofill should handle the rest, making checkout as seamless as possible.

What might not be obvious is the mental load for the customer.

Upsells, header navigation, extra form fields—these might seem harmless, but they can distract or overwhelm customers just enough to make them bounce.

Test and remove anything that doesn’t directly support conversions.

Key Takeaway: Your checkout should be fast, intuitive, and impossible to mess up. Anything less, and you’re leaving money on the table.

Trust

The biggest reason customers hesitate at checkout is trust.

And it’s not that they think you’re going to steal or lose their card information (if they have any doubt they’ll just pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay etc).

It’s uncertainty about the product.

Is it worth their money, and will they regret their purchase?

Buyer’s remorse is the worst.

Especially for first-time buyers, without enough trust signals, doubt wins—and they abandon their cart.

So how to build trust?

People build trust.

UGC. Real customer photos and videos do more to sell a product than any studio-shot campaign ever could.

Seeing real people use the product—and love it—is what pushes hesitant buyers over the edge.

Even repeat buyers need some kind of trust signals.

Place reviews, testimonials, and star ratings directly within the checkout flow—not buried on a separate page.

Reinforce confidence by making trust signals impossible to ignore when the customer is deciding whether to buy.

Key Takeaway: People only buy from brands they trust. Make sure your customers trust you.

Shipping

Research from Baymard finds that 71% of people have abandoned a cart because of either:

  • Too many extra costs (usually shipping)

  • Slow delivery estimates

Yeah, shipping is a huge pain point for selling things online. And it’s only gotten worse since Amazon made free, fast shipping the norm.

If your shipping options are expensive, slow (or both), you’re going to get a lot of abandons.

So what is there to do about it?

Offer free shipping across the board? Have people on hand to deliver instantly?

Perhaps not. You’ve still got to be realistic. Someone’s got to pay for shipping. It’s either going to be you, or the customer.

You can get more conversions with free shipping, but with lower margins. Or maintain margins while potentially losing some carts.

Ultimately it’s something you want to test. Don’t assume that free shipping is always best—you might find lower conversions are worth it, for more profits at the end of the day.

For high-retention brands, taking a loss on the first sale can be a strategic move to get customers in the door, knowing they’ll make it back in repeat purchases.

But for others, the data might reveal that profits are higher without subsidising shipping for every customer.

Regardless, test different approaches (including different free shipping thresholds and offering expedited shipping options for a higher cost).

Key Takeaway: Rather than assuming free shipping is the answer, test and let the data guide you. Remember that the goal isn’t just more conversions—it’s more profitable conversions.

Cost

The dollar amount looks a lot bigger in the customer’s cart, when they’re putting in their cart details, than when they’re on the PDP—regardless of whether or not any extra costs pop up.

This is where many brands default to offering a discount, thinking it will push the customer over the edge.

But discounting as a knee-jerk reaction creates two problems:

  • It kills your margins

  • It trains customers to expect discounts and erodes brand value.

If every purchase feels like it needs a discount to convert, you’ve set a dangerous precedent.

Price is not the core issue, anyway.

It’s perceived value.

You can reframe the value, or make the customer feel like they’re getting more for their money.

Show the savings they’re getting if the product’s on sale or they buy a bundle.

If the customer leaves their cart without checking out, don’t immediately offer a discount.

Build more trust or highlight the value of the product in your follow-ups. Think in terms of value, not cost.

If you do offer discounts in your cart abandonment sequences, be strategic about it.

  • Don’t offer blanket discounts (this conditions customers to wait for one)

  • Instead, segment by behavior:

    • High-value cart abandoners? Maybe a small incentive.

    • Browsers showing strong engagement? A final follow-up with 10-15% off can work.

Cost will always be an objection, and there’s no way to remove it entirely. But brands that figure out how to justify the price rather than lower it will win in the long run.

Key Takeaway: Don’t rush in to offer discounts to convert more carts. Highlight value instead.

Intent

The biggest misconception about cart abandonment is that every shopper who leaves did so because of a specific issue:

  • Too much friction

  • Surprise costs

  • A lack of trust

These reasons could be at play. But sometimes it’s just because the time wasn’t right.

Think of abandoned carts as high-intent window shopping.

Some shoppers add items to their cart just to check the final price with taxes and shipping.

Others do it as a mental wishlist, enjoying the small dopamine hit of clicking "add to cart" but never fully committing. Some get distracted.

The key is recognizing that an abandoned cart doesn’t mean rejection—it means interest.

This is where most brands miss the mark. Instead of seeing abandonment as lost revenue, treat it as a golden opportunity to follow up with a customer who has already shown buying intent.

You now know exactly what they’re interested in, giving you a clear path to re-engage them.

Key Takeaway: Many abandoned carts are not lost sales but lukewarm leads. If you’re not following up, you’re ignoring a large amount of potential revenue.

Abandoned Cart Follow-Ups

Most shoppers leave for reasons that can still be overcome:

  • Hesitation

  • Price concerns

  • Friction

  • Or just distraction/lack of intent

The key? A smart, structured follow-up strategy to win people back.

Every brand needs an abandoned cart sequence running on autopilot—at a minimum.

The best brands take a multi-touch approach:

  • 1 hour after abandonment – A short, urgency-driven reminder. “Your cart is waiting—items may sell out!”

  • 24 hours later – Overcome objections. Show reviews, answer FAQs, and reinforce easy returns.

  • 48 hours later – Final push. Reinforce urgency, highlight social proof, or (strategically) offer an incentive.

And don’t rely on email alone.

  • SMS and push notifications have much higher open and engagement rates than email.

  • If you have an app, push notifications are a game-changer for retargeting.

We’ve worked with brands who have seen some pretty incredible results from using push for abandoned carts, with minimal effort to set up.

Test different versions of copy, and sequencing (small changes can make a significant difference, and unorthodox approaches often make your emails stand out).

If you’re not running a structured abandoned cart sequence—or haven’t tested and optimized yours—you’re leaving money on the table.

Summing Up: Framing Cart Abandonment the Right Way

If you take one thing away from this, let it be this: abandoned carts are revenue waiting to be recovered.

These shoppers aren’t cold prospects. They’ve already shown intent. Something held them back—price hesitation, trust issues, friction at checkout.

Identify the objection, follow up the right way, and many will convert.

The highest-leverage moves:

  • Optimize your checkout – Remove friction. One-click payments, autofill, and a seamless flow

  • Reinforce trust – UGC, reviews, and clear return policies reduce hesitation

  • Follow up smartly – Multi-touch abandoned cart sequences via email, SMS, and push

This isn’t about throwing discounts at the problem. It’s about turning hesitation into conversions (profitably).

If you aren’t optimizing for cart recovery, you’re not just losing sales. You’re missing one of the easiest ways to grow revenue without spending more on ads.

Diving Deeper

If cart abandonment is a real problem for your brand, or you just want to make sure you’re not leaving any money on the table, we just finished a 5-article deep dive on our website.

You can check out the articles here (bookmark them for later!):

Quick Hits

Check out some of the best content we’ve read from in and around the ecom world this week.

$30k/mo in New Revenue by Adjusting Free Shipping Threshold

Is your free shipping threshold working for you? Or costing you money?

Parker Burr shares how one brand added 5 figures in new revenue, just by increasing their free shipping threshold.

A change like this could hurt conversions, or it could be free money for your brand.

The only way you’re gonna know which is to test.

The Case For and Against a Super Bowl Ad

You’ve probably seen (or at least heard about) HexClad’s Super Bowl ad.

And you might be surprised to hear this, but Super Bowl ads aren’t cheap. Just a little matter of $8million dollars for a 30-second spot.

So is it worth it for a DTC brand like Hex Clad to drop nearly $10m on a short but memorable ad with Gordon Ramsay and Pete Davidson?

This article seeks to answer that question.

Ecom Math from Ridge

Want to know how a men’s accessory brand grows to $100m+?

Ridge’s CEO Sean Frank gives a quick lesson on the math behind successful brands (and explains why, by his own admission, Ridge is a 5/10 idea that wouldn’t work today).

Luckily there’s no calculus involved here. Just a simple formula that can predict whether a brand is going to win before it even gets started.

Yeti 2024 Earnings Breakdown

If you love financials, this is for you.

Drew Fallon takes us into a deep dive into the earnings report from billion-dollar DTC brand Yeti, and theorizes on what might be next for the brand.

That’s all we have for this week.

Stay tuned at the same time for next week’s newsletter, where we’ll take another dive into a CX and retention topic that will help your brand spark sustainable growth.

Hit reply if you have any thoughts on this week’s topic, or anything you’d love to see in a future deep dive.

Until next time!

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

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