How to Optimize the Shopping Cart on Your Online Store

Seven out of every ten carts filled on your store are never paid for. Baymard Institute, which has run ecommerce usability testing for over a decade, documents a 70.22% abandonment rate averaged across fifty independent studies. Almost everyone has heard that number by now. What gets less attention is where a good share of the damage happens: on the cart page itself, before checkout even begins.

Most stores treat the cart as a tollbooth, an intermediate screen the customer should cross quickly on the way to paying. Shoppers use it to decide. That’s where they compare, adjust quantities, park things they might buy and do the mental math on whether the total works for them. Baymard found that 58% of sites have a cart design that actively hinders people using it that way. Optimizing the cart mostly means you stop fighting what shoppers already do there.

1. What is the customer actually doing in the cart?

The same behavior surfaces over and over in Baymard’s user testing. People use the cart as a tool to temporarily save items of interest, compare them against each other and keep whichever survives. Adding something to the cart marks that product as a candidate, and the decision comes later.

That distinction changes the whole design. If the cart is a form to get past, it makes sense to rush the customer toward the pay button and strip out distractions. If it’s the room where the decision gets made, hiding information and making adjustments awkward pushes them to go think about it somewhere else. And we all know what happens when someone says they’ll think about it.

Look at your cart through that lens. Is the product photo big enough to recognize? Are the chosen size and color shown? Can someone jump back to the product page and return without losing anything? Those are the questions of a person still comparing options.

2. Why does the total cost need to be visible here?

Because 23% of US shoppers abandoned an order in the past quarter solely because they weren’t given an upfront estimate of the total order cost. That Baymard figure is among the most damning ever published about carts, because it isolates a single cause. Those shoppers didn’t leave over a high price. They left because they couldn’t find out what the price was.

Shipping is the usual suspect. The cost is fixed from minute one, but the shopper doesn’t see it until two screens later, once the total is already settled in their head. Watching that total jump at the last step feels like the rules changed mid-game.

Among people who abandon for a stated reason, 40% do it precisely because extra costs for shipping, taxes and fees felt too high. It tops the list by a wide margin over the second reason.

In the cart, you fix that with a shipping calculator that works from a ZIP code alone and a free-shipping threshold sitting next to the subtotal. If your policy is “free shipping over $50,” the cart should tell the person carrying $41 exactly how much is left.

3. Is it really that bad if changing a quantity is awkward?

Worse than it looks, and it’s been measured. Baymard found that 86% of sites make it difficult to update quantities (50%) or remove items (36%) in the cart. Those are the two most frequent actions on that page, and most stores get them wrong.

The classic case is the quantity selector as a free text field, which is what 97% of sites use instead of plus and minus buttons.

In Baymard’s testing, one participant went to change 1 unit to 2, typed the 2 without clearing the number already there, and ended up with 21 items in the cart. Their verbatim reaction: “Whoops, no, we don’t want 21… Hold on, let’s try that again.” Nobody abandons a purchase over that alone. But every stumble adds friction at a moment when the customer can still back out.

Removing an item has its own problem. Plenty of stores bury it behind a tiny icon or blur it into emptying the whole cart, and when someone deletes something by mistake and can’t undo it, they don’t always bother hunting it down again.

An undo link next to the removal message costs half an hour of development.

4. What do I do with items the customer hasn’t decided on yet?

Give them somewhere to put them. Since the cart works in practice as a shortlist, “save for later” solves a real tension: the customer wants to trim the order down to what they’ll actually pay for today without losing track of the rest. Without that option, the only exit you leave them is deleting the item, and deleted items rarely come back.

The useful version of this feature parks the item right below the cart, visible, with its price and a one-click button to return it to the order. The useless version sends it to a wishlist hidden behind a login, which amounts to demanding an account from someone who hasn’t bought anything yet.

5. Do product recommendations in the cart help or get in the way?

They help only when they’re good, and most aren’t. Baymard found that 52% of desktop sites present cross-sells in the cart, or in the “added to cart” confirmation, that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought. Their user testing turned up something that should worry anyone selling online: one questionable suggestion was enough to make participants lose faith in all the product recommendations and ignore them entirely.

The “customers also bought” logic is what produces those absurd results. Add a pair of running shoes and the system offers you more running shoes, which is the last thing you need. The recommendation that earns its place in the cart is complementary, like the laces or the cleaner, things used alongside what’s already chosen.

Space limits matter here too. The cart is a decision screen, so suggestions belong below the order summary and the pay button, never competing with them. If your recommendation block pushes the total off screen on a phone, it’s doing more harm than good.

What people save and don’t buy also works as a diagnostic. When an item gets saved often and bought rarely, it usually has a price problem or is missing information on the product page.

6. What changes in the cart when the customer is on a phone?

A twelve-pixel trash icon sitting next to a minus button is an invitation to delete the wrong product with your thumb. On a phone, the cart’s problem is space, and space changes the priorities.

The order summary and the pay button compete with everything else for a couple of inches. The practical rule is that the total and the primary button stay reachable without hunting for them, even when the cart holds eight items. Everything tappable needs a generous touch target and real separation between actions that do opposite things.

Baymard’s most recent benchmark of 334 large stores rates the purchase experience on 63% of mobile sites as mediocre or worse. Only 2% reach “good,” and not one store lands in the top category.

7. Are abandoned cart emails worth setting up?

Yes, and they’re among the best returns in ecommerce because they speak to people who already picked you. Omnisend’s 2025 data, measured across more than twenty billion emails, gives abandoned cart automation a 37.12% open rate, a 1.72% conversion rate and an average of $3.59 generated per email sent.

Recovery email is a patch. If 40% of your shoppers leave over extra costs, sending them the same cart with the same extra costs doesn’t change why they left. It works best when it answers the objection: reminding them how close they were to the free-shipping threshold, confirming the delivery window, showing the returns policy.

You need the email address for any of this, which is where mandatory accounts trip people up. The clean way to get it is capturing it early in checkout, in the first step, before the shipping address and payment.

8. How much room is really in all this?

Baymard calculates that the average large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% conversion increase through better purchase flow design alone, counting only the problems their research has documented as solvable. Extrapolated across the US and European markets, that’s roughly $260 billion recoverable without bringing in a single new visitor.

That comes from auditing large, well-funded stores, so don’t read it as a promise for your case. Read it for what it is: if Amazon, Walmart and ASOS leave that much on the table in their own purchase flow, the odds your cart is flawless are low.

The good news is that almost none of this requires redesigning the store. Showing the total cost, fixing the quantity selector and capturing the email early are contained changes, on a single page, each with evidence behind it.

Where to start

Start by looking at your own cart the way an undecided customer would. Add three products from your phone, change a quantity, delete one, try to work out what shipping will cost, and note every moment you had to guess at something. That ten-minute walkthrough usually surfaces more problems than any report.

Then rank the fixes by evidence. Total cost visible before checkout has the strongest backing, with easy order adjustments behind it. If you want the full funnel context, how to improve conversions on your online store covers the other levers, from page speed to the returns policy.

This is the work we do every day on our clients’ stores, usually on Shopify, measuring before and after so we know what actually moved. Get in touch and we’ll go through your cart with this list in hand.

Frequently asked questions

What is a normal cart abandonment rate for an online store?

Baymard Institute documents a 70.22% average, calculated across fifty independent studies published between 2006 and 2025. That means seven out of every ten carts that get filled are never paid for. If your store sits near that figure you're average, and average leaves plenty of room to improve.

Why do people abandon their carts without buying?

42% of US shoppers say they were just browsing. Among those who abandon for a concrete reason, 40% do so because extra costs for shipping, tax and fees felt too high, according to Baymard. Another 20% leave over slow delivery and 18% because the site demanded they create an account.

Should I show shipping costs before checkout?

Yes. Baymard measured that 23% of US shoppers abandoned an order in the past quarter solely because they weren't given an upfront estimate of the total order cost. A shipping calculator in the cart, or a clearly visible free-shipping threshold, prevents that surprise at the end.

Are product recommendations in the cart worth it?

Only if they're good ones. Baymard found that 52% of desktop sites show cross-sells in the cart that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought. In their testing, a single questionable suggestion was enough to make users lose faith in every other recommendation and ignore them all.

Why does editing quantities in the cart matter so much?

Because many people use the cart as a decision screen. Baymard found that 86% of sites make it difficult to update quantities (50%) or remove items (36%). When changing a number turns into a chore, the customer who was adjusting their order ends up closing the tab instead.

Do abandoned cart emails actually work?

Yes, and quite well. Omnisend's 2025 data gives abandoned cart automation a 37.12% open rate and a 1.72% conversion rate, averaging $3.59 generated per email sent. It's revenue you recover without buying any new traffic.

How much can conversion improve if I fix the cart and checkout?

Baymard calculates a 35.26% average conversion increase from better purchase flow design alone. That number comes from auditing large US and European stores, so treat it as a signal of how much room exists rather than a promise for any given shop.

Should I send shoppers straight to checkout after they add to cart?

It depends on your catalog. Skipping the cart speeds up single-item purchases, but it takes away the place where multi-item shoppers review and adjust their order. If your average order includes more than one unit, keep a cart page that works properly.