If add-to-cart is healthy and orders are not, you have ruled out most of the store. The product page did its job. Something between the cart and the confirmation is undoing it.
That is a short stretch and the causes are well understood.
The costs that were not visible earlier
Shipping revealed at the last step is the largest single cause, and it is not a checkout fault. Someone decided to buy based on a price, and then the price changed. The fix is on the product page: show the delivery cost, or the threshold for free delivery, before the decision rather than after it.
Same for duties on international orders, and for taxes if your display is exclusive.
Forced account creation
Still present on more stores than it should be. A guest checkout option is not a nice-to-have; making people create an account to spend money is asking for a favour at the worst possible moment.
The delivery date is vague
"Ships in 3–5 business days" is weaker than a date. If someone is buying for an occasion, uncertainty is a reason to leave and check a competitor who was specific.
The payment method they use is missing
Regional and generational. If your audience expects a wallet, a buy-now-pay-later option, or a local method and it is absent, some proportion simply will not proceed.
Check your checkout on mobile, on a real phone, as a new customer, paying with a method you do not normally use. Most checkout faults are invisible to the person who set it up.
Something in the cart is confusing
Discount codes that do not apply. A subscription toggle that changed the price. An upsell that added something the customer did not notice choosing. Each produces a moment of doubt, and doubt at the cart is expensive.
What to do about it
Instrument the steps. Shopify reports cart, checkout and purchase separately. Find which of those transitions is bleeding rather than treating "abandonment" as one number.
Read the recovery emails you are already sending. If people reply to them, that is free research.
Move the surprises earlier. Almost every fix on this page is really "tell them sooner".
Talk it through
Tell us your cart-to-order rate.
Send that plus your store URL and we will tell you which step is losing people and what is causing it — usually something on the product page rather than in the checkout itself.
Get a readA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
The number worth knowing
Cart abandonment around 70% is normal and not a crisis. Checkout abandonment — people who started checkout and did not finish — should be far lower. If that number is above roughly 30%, something specific is wrong and it is findable.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Manpreet Singh is the founder of Proscube, an ecommerce growth studio. He leads the studio's Shopify and Shopify Plus engineering, headless builds, CRO, and its work on AI engine optimization, and writes its guidance on how to grow a DTC brand without wasting money. He works directly with founders — no account-manager layers between you and the people doing the work — and would rather tell a client not to build something than sell them work they don't need.
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