Why Website Visitors Leave Before Buying (and How to Prevent Cart Abandonment)

Introduction

A customer visits your site, searches for some products in the cart, and then disappears. No response. Just another mark added in bounce rate statistics.

The e-commerce market has a common trend of customer disappearance. Baymard Institute published a study last year in 2024 that the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.57%. It means that 7 out of 10 customers leave the cart without shopping.

So, the question arises why customers are not interested in shopping online. And what strategy will you apply to develop interest in customers for online shopping?

Let’s explore the main reasons for low e-commerce sales, along with robust solutions to reduce bounce rate, upgrade customer journeys, and refine website conversations.

Why Customers Don’t Buy Online: Key Reasons for High Bounce Rates

• Poor Website Experience (Slow, Confusing, or Not Mobile-Friendly)
  When visitors can’t navigate easily, or pages take too long to load, they’ll abandon the journey before buying.
  
  
  • 57% of users do not like to do business with poorly made and managed mobile sites.
  • The bounce rate increases by 32% when a website takes a time to load from 1 second to 3 seconds to load.
  • When visitors are unable to navigate easily or pages become unresponsive, they’ll skip the online shopping.
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  • Six thousand consumers across the US and Europe were asked about their online shopping behavior and views on website functionality. 60% of consumers say they abandon purchases due to poor user experience on websites. E-commerce companies are losing an average of 5 purchases a year per consumer, with 8% of consumers abandoning more than 10 purchases.
  • Features and additional functionality on websites are far less important to consumers than ease of navigation, fast loading speeds, and simple design. In positive news, 60% said that e-commerce sites are getting better, with only 5% saying the experience is worse.
• Lack of Trust or Security Concerns
  
  • Online retailers have started giving plenty of offers that have increased the online traffic to a great extent. Regularly, online giants like Amazon, Flipkart, AliExpress, etc., are advertising huge discounts and offers that are luring a large number of customers to shop from their websites. Companies like Nykaa, MakeMyTrip, Snapdeal, Jabong, etc. are offering attractive promotional deals that are enticing customers.
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  • Security and Privacy: A Top Priority for Customers
    
    • Despite so many advantages, some customers may feel online shopping is risky and not trustworthy. The research proposed that there is a strong relationship between trust and loyalty, and most often, customers trust brands far more than a retailer selling that brand. In the case of online shopping, there is no face-to-face interaction between seller and buyer, which makes it non-socialize, and the buyer is sometimes unable to develop trust.
    • Trust in the e-commerce retailer is crucial to convert potential customers into actual customers. However, the internet provides unlimited products and services, but along with those unlimited services, there is perceived risk in digital shopping, such as mobile application shopping, catalogue or mail order.
    • Online visitors are always on alert. Red flags are raised in case of missing SSL certificates, unconvincing customer reviews, or unclear return policies. If there is negligence on your site, payment details will not be provided on your site by the customer.
• Hidden Costs at Checkout
  
  • Unreasonable cost or unexpected delivery is one of the biggest cart abandonment reasons.
  • A study by Baymard Institute found that 48% of shoppers with actual purchase intent (i.e., those who aren't window shopping) abandon carts due to extra costs.
  • Almost half of all online shoppers in Baymard’s 2022 study reported that the extra costs were too high for them to complete their purchase. These costs include shipping, tax, and other extra fees, like customs costs, as the leading cause of abandoned carts.
• Complicated Checkout Process
  Complexity isn’t always obvious—it can creep in through:
  • Too Many Steps: Why ask for shipping info, billing info, payment method, account creation, and a subscription opt-in—all on separate pages? A marathon checkout feels endless.
  • Mandatory Account Creation: Few things scream “commitment issues” like forcing someone to sign up just to buy a $10 candle.
  • Unclear Progress Indicators: If users don’t know how many steps are left, they assume the worst (five more pages? Ten? The rest of their lives?).
  • Unnecessary Form Fields: Do you really need to know someone’s middle name or favorite pet from childhood? No, you don’t.
  • Payment Complications: Unsupported cards, buggy autofill, or confusing error messages can make people think, “Forget it, I didn’t need that avocado slicer anyway.”
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• No Real-Time Customer Support
  
  • Customers leave the site immediately when they get stuck and can’t find help. A live chat solution like Chattrik helps customers by answering questions instantly. This reduces the cart abandonment ratio at large.
  • Add Live Chat to Your Store Today – Keep Customers Engaged Before They Leave.
• Lack of Personalization in the Customer Journey
  
  • Generic shopping does not develop interest in customers. Customers look for particular products, suggestions, offers, and recommendations that they want, and browse online.

How to Reduce Bounce Rate and Prevent Cart Abandonment

This is a fact that customers don’t accept excuses. Now, look at the actionable strategies that are bound to reduce the bounce rate in e-commerce and enhance conversions.

• Optimize Website Speed and Mobile Experience
  
  • Build Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
  • All of this can seem complicated, and that’s why Google created a simpler solution for page speed optimization. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is a subset of HTML that follows much more stringent guidelines about what can be included. The goal is to get most pages to a 1-second load time on mobile, which it generally does.
  • AMP allows Google to take control of most of the hard stuff by caching and configuring the loading process and most of the elements described above so that it is as optimized as possible.
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  • In some cases, businesses create new AMP pages and link to them from existing pages on the site from the head tag. This tells Google to serve the AMP page when the person requesting the page is on a mobile device or a slow connection. In other cases, you can replace their existing pages (or their existing mobile pages, if they have separate sites) with AMP pages. This is called “Canonical AMP,” or “AMP canonical.”
  • Google prefers this method because AMP pages are exceedingly easy for Google to crawl, render, index, and rank. Businesses may not prefer it, though, because the limitations and requirements of AMP can make pages a bit stark. AMP can also complicate or limit some of the tracking and testing that you can do on desktop pages, so this is another reason that some people avoid it.
  • Sites that are AMP valid follow all the AMP rules and guidelines, and in turn, Google shows a little grey lightning bolt with them in mobile results. Google is more likely to include them in special carousels of results that tend to rank at the top of a page.
  • This is great, but if being AMP valid will cause too many problems for your website, it is ok to use AMP code without being AMP valid. You should use AMP HTML when you can, without worrying about following all the rules. You will still benefit from the speed of AMP HTML and AMP JavaScript—not a bad deal considering that it’s free.
  • Remember, speed has a direct impact on engagement and conversion, but likely also helps with crawl depth and other aspects of crawl efficiency.
  • Mobile browsers work differently from desktop browsers. They also have slower processors and less reliable connections. These factors make it important to review the load time for your site's pages from a worst-case mobile perspective to understand where there are real opportunities for improvement.
  • Compress everything that you can.
  • After you minimize and prioritize the RTR for each page template, you should compress what you can. Compression helps increase page speed by saving bandwidth. Gzip compression is one way to compress files, and it can be set up on most servers, but other options are available.
  • You can also run most code through a minification process, which reduces the size of the final transfer file. However, it is difficult to compress images through these methods. You can use the Performance Review page on WebPageTest.org to find the Full Optimization Checklist, which shows all of the assets on the page, whether they are Gzipped, and their level of compression.
  • For image compression, instead of zipping and minimizing your images, it is important that the designer hands them off to the developer in the most compressed format possible, reducing image files. Essentially, they need to make the end file size as small as possible without compromising the appearance of the image.
  • Photos should generally be saved as JPG files, and icons and illustrations should be saved as GIF files. To make large images look great on full-screen computers, without bogging down tiny mobile screens, consider using the responsive images protocol, or using an image server like the one from Fastly to dynamically send a pre-scaled version of the image to smaller screens.
• Build Trust with Transparency and Reviews
  
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  • Be Clear and Upfront About Pricing
  • Clear and fair pricing is fundamental to building trust. Customers appreciate knowing exactly what they’re paying.
  • Avoid hiding fees or charges until the customer is about to complete the sale. This can lead to frustration and cart abandonment.
  • Outline the product price, and any taxes, shipping fees, or additional charges like credit card processing fees.
  • Provide Accurate and Detailed Product Descriptions
  • Customers rely on accurate and detailed product descriptions to make informed purchasing decisions.
  • To optimize your product descriptions and increase transparency, provide as much information as possible.
  • Highlight key features, benefits, and specifications of your product or service. Explain how they can solve specific pain points. Present this information in a concise and digestible way.
  • Collect and Display Product Reviews
  • Another simple way to build trust and increase transparency is to collect and display reviews.
  • Not only do the majority of online shoppers read customer reviews, but about 50% trust them as much as personal recommendations.
  • EDD Reviews makes it easy for customers to leave reviews and ratings for your products. Then you showcase them across your marketing materials and product pages.
• Simplify and Streamline the Checkout Process
  
  • Checkouts that have too many form fields, too many steps, or a confusing setup drive almost one in five customers away from their online shopping carts.
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  • After researching checkout design and usability, folks at Baymard found that a checkout flow should be as short as 12-14 form elements (or seven to eight if only counting form fields). But their checkout benchmark database shows that the average checkout flow in the US has 23.48 form elements—leaving plenty of room for improvement.
  • Improve your shopping cart UX by removing distractions—like newsletter signup links and social media icons—making it easy to edit, reducing the number of form fields, and making the checkout CTA the boldest element on the page.
• Tackle Cart Abandonment with Personalized Email Marketing
  • Email marketing has evolved far beyond just using a customer's first name. Modern personalization means creating custom email content based on how customers behave, what they like, what they've bought before, and even what they're browsing right now. When done well, this targeted approach helps build real connections with customers and gets better results.
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  • The growth of personalized emails came from better ways to collect and analyze customer data. As online stores got more advanced tools for tracking behavior, they could create much more targeted campaigns. Basic mass emails have been replaced by messages crafted for each person.
• Offer Real-Time Support with Live Chat
  • With the help of live chat, like Chattrik’s live chat feature, you can:
    • Engage customers before they abandon.
    • Start a proactive chat when a customer lingers on checkout
    • Respond to the question, whatever the nature it carries.
  • This directly impacts customer journey optimization, turning hesitation into conversion.
• Personalize the Experience
  • Product recommendations based on browsing history have become essential for modern online stores. Using AI and machine learning, stores can analyze what products customers view, which categories they browse, and what they search for. This allows them to suggest items that match each shopper's interests, making the experience more personal and boosting sales.
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  • The system works by using machine learning to track how customers interact with the site in real-time. As shoppers browse, the system spots patterns in their behavior and automatically shows relevant product suggestions. This goes beyond basic "you might also like" recommendations to predict what each customer wants based on their unique shopping journey.
  • Major platforms like Amazon pioneered this approach with features like "Customers who viewed this also viewed" and "Frequently bought together." Netflix helped prove the power of personalized recommendations through its movie suggestions. Even Spotify demonstrates how analyzing browsing history can create value with its "Discover Weekly" playlists.

Customer Journey Optimization: Real-World Examples

Case studies:

• Spotify
  • Spotify is one of the world’s most popular audio streaming services. When Spotify wanted to improve the music-sharing experience for its customers, it hired a marketing firm to create a customer journey map.
  • The goal of this user journey map was to determine where music-sharing features are the best fit into the customer experience.
  • In this example, we see the user experience mapped out from the moment the user first opens Spotify on a mobile device, all the way through to whether they like a song that a friend has shared.
  • Throughout each stage and every touchpoint, the brand lists what a customer is engaging with, doing, thinking, and feeling (something that's commonly done with an empathy map). The agency used data research and customer surveys to better understand how users felt at each touchpoint in the customer journey to collect this information.
  • Based on the customer journey map, Spotify was able to identify pain points for users and address those pain points so that the music sharing experience is smooth and seamless, encouraging more users to share music -- and to do it more often. I am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.
  • This journey map is excellent because it identifies key areas of customer engagement, takes into account customer behavior, and has the goal of making the customer experience as enjoyable as possible.
  • The end result is significantly higher customer satisfaction, which can have several key benefits, including a smoother buyer journey, greater customer loyalty, and, in many cases, existing customers becoming brand advocates.
• TurboTax
  
  • TurboTax is a leading online software package for preparing taxes. When the TurboTax team was ready to launch a new product called Personal Pro, they created a customer journey map to better understand the overall customer experience with this new product.
  • The team used a mix of data research, customer surveys, and key conversations with tax professionals to understand how the product fits into the lives of those using it.
  • TurboTax’s customer journey analytics exercise starts when someone enters the website and is in the consideration phase through to the completion of the tax filing.
  • This customer journey map is great because it allows the team to see each customer's pain points experienced and, therefore, address these pain points to make the customer experience smoother and more satisfactory.

Final Thoughts: Turning Abandonment into Opportunity

High website visitor bounce rates and cart abandonment are not just figures but opportunities. There is always a chance to re-engage a customer, build trust, and improve the server’s performance.

By sorting out the reasons customers abandon the online shopping, from poor usability to less support, you can convert your website into a conversion powerhouse.

Stop losing sales to cart abandonment. With Chattrik, you can build trust, simplify checkout, and give customers the seamless experience they expect. Start turning browsers into loyal buyers today with Chattrik.