The last thing any ecommerce business wants is a bunch of abandoned carts. Cart abandonment is one of the most challenging and expensive puzzles for business owners to solve. Do users have to add items to their cart to see shipping costs? Are they simply window shopping? Sometimes there is no clear answer.

As of 2026, the average online cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. When over two-thirds of potential sales don’t go through, millions of dollars are left on the table. Users give a long list of reasons for cart abandonment. The most popular answer (43% of Baymard’s study participants) is that they were just browsing. Other popular reasons include shipping costs or other fees being too high (39%) and slow delivery times (21%).

Cart abandonment translates directly into lost sales, but fortunately, many popular reasons for abandonment are fixable. Baymard estimates the value of the ecommerce industry at $738 billion, and according to their research, improving a site’s checkout design can boost conversion by 35.26%. This translates into $260 billion worth of recoverable abandoned carts across the industry.

StyleHaven, an online clothing business, implemented a sleek new redesign of their checkout. Their cart abandonment rate jumped from 68% to 79%, signaling that something was wrong. Unable to figure out whether the problem was with UX or marketing, they turned to FableSense AI for help.

First, they gathered 6 usability test recording transcripts and checkout funnel data from 25 sessions. Some of their starting data:

They fed the data into the tool and realized there were 5 key themes, many of which reflect the most common reasons for cart abandonment:

One of the usability test participants called out the $14.99 hidden shipping cost specifically. Another abandoned his cart because there was no Apple Pay option, and he didn’t have his wallet on him at the time. International shoppers did not appreciate having to do currency conversion math to figure out prices in their local currency. The policy of having customers pay return shipping was unpopular.

The FableSense AI tool offers a joint display that shows customer complaints filtered by category next to dataset statistics. Choosing “unexpected shipping cost” revealed that 91% of customers who complained about the shipping cost abandoned their carts at the payment stage, and these carts had an average order value of $67.40.

StyleHaven decided to make the following major changes:

Center the user. All 3 changes made something easier and/or faster for the user. In StyleHaven’s original dataset, users who spent less time on the payment page converted, and those who spent a long time did not. Make the checkout experience as fast and seamless as possible, and your cart abandonment rate will improve.

StyleHaven’s redesign clearly hurt the business. Even if it was only live for a short amount of time, it could have cost thousands depending on how much traffic the store had.

Let’s keep the math simple and assume there were 10,000 visitors in a month, and the add-to-cart rate was 6%, which is standard in the apparel industry.

Those carts were worth a combined $40,440. On the old site, 68% would be abandoned, though, resulting in $12,941 of revenue. On the new site, 79% would be abandoned.

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