4 ways to reduce cart abandonment and drive more sales

Abandoned carts are a major challenge for small businesses. They can drive up acquisition costs, decrease customer lifetime value (LTV), and send potential customers to competitors.

But abandoned carts are also a clear sign of buyer intent. If you’re seeing a significant amount of them, it means you have a great opportunity to grow revenue without necessarily spending a lot more on acquisition.

According to Klaviyo’s latest marketing benchmarks, abandoned cart flows deliver more revenue than any other type of flow. They average a revenue per recipient of $3.07 and a 2.68% placed order rate.

To reduce cart abandonment and drive more conversions, it’s important to understand why shoppers are dropping off, address issues at check-out, and personalize your outreach.

Let’s explore the most common reasons for cart abandonment and how to prevent it from happening.

Why do shoppers abandon their carts?

According to the Baymard Institute, 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. Here are some of the top reasons consumers don’t follow through with their purchases:

Unexpected costs and high shipping fees

McKinsey research found that more than 90% of shoppers are likely to back out of a purchase when shipping costs feel too high for standard products. Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, meanwhile, found that the No. 1 reason consumers abandon carts is that they found a better price elsewhere.

Transparent pricing early in the customer journey can help build trust and keep customers from dropping off.

Restrictive or ambiguous return and delivery policies

The same McKinsey research found that more than 65% of consumers are likely to abandon carts due to restrictive return policies such as final sale.

Ambiguous delivery, exchange, and refund policies can also lead to higher cart abandonment rates. If someone is confused about when they’ll receive their purchase—or the hoops they’d need to jump through if they want to return it—that’s friction that may cause them to think twice about buying.

Friction during check-out

The Baymard Institute research shows that 18% of consumers abandon their carts when the check-out process is too long or too complicated. This is especially important to remember for mobile check-out: our future of consumer marketing report found that mobile is now the primary way people shop retail brands.

Common points of check-out friction can include:

• Mandatory account creation with no guest check-out option
• Check-out pages that don’t work well on mobile
• Long or complex forms with too many steps or fields
• Missing auto-fill or saved payment options

Delayed intent or distractions

Sometimes people just need more time. Their intent hasn’t necessarily disappeared, but they might be:

• Comparing product prices or delivery options between competitors
• Checking reviews or product details
• Searching for promo codes or discounts

Shoppers might also abandon their carts when they get distracted by notifications or daily tasks. Their interest is often still there, and a timely reminder can be enough to bring them back to complete their purchase.

Lack of trust in your brand

Consumers who aren’t familiar with your brand may hesitate to complete their purchase until they’re sure others have had good experiences.

According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, 26% of consumers will give brands a second chance after a negative experience because of a strong brand reputation or a demonstrated history of positive experiences.

Social proof, reviews, and clear policies can go a long way toward reassuring customers that their purchase will be high quality and worth the price.

How to turn abandoned carts into a reliable source of revenue

The best recovery strategies begin before the cart is abandoned. Here are 4 ways to turn abandoned carts into opportunities:

1. Remove friction from the check-out experience

Make the check-out process simple, easy, and smooth for customers shopping on any device.

Here are a few ways to streamline check-outs and encourage purchases:

• Track drop-offs at each step of the check-out process to make sure you’re addressing the most obvious signs of friction first.
• Offer guest check-out to make it easy for first-time buyers to complete their purchase.
• Limit check-out fields to what’s essential, like name, email, address, and payment information.
• Enable auto-fill on check-out pages so that customers can save their information for a faster, more convenient buying experience.
• Optimize check-out for mobile with short forms, easy-to-tap buttons, and a smooth, scrollable layout.
• Create an on-site, self-service hub where customers can wishlist items and purchase when they’re ready.

Now that intimates brand Thirdlove has added a personalized self-service customer hub to their website, each shopper sees a “For You” page where they can view and favorite items, receive personalized product recommendations, and track and redeem loyalty points. In just 30 days, Thirdlove saw their loyalty point redemption rate hit an all-time high of 30%, showing that customers are receptive to a smoother customer journey.

2. Build trust before and during check-out

People buy from brands they trust. And according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, most consumers (41%) are only loyal to 1–2 brands. That said, the same report found that 38% are loyal to 3–5 brands.

With the potential payoff of higher customer LTV and higher retention, it’s worth the investment to build trust with customers who may become loyal to your brand. One creative way to do that: using AI to make shopping feel more personal and reassuring.

Klaviyo’s 2025 AI shopping index found that 56% of consumers prefer AI assistants over humans for personalized product recommendations, and 68% prefer to use them to access instant answers.

With that in mind, here are some quick ways to build trust with customers as they browse and make purchase decisions:

• Create comprehensive product pages that include detailed, accurate descriptions and clear return and shipping policies.
• Add user-generated content and social proof like reviews, ratings, and testimonials. Our future of consumer marketing report found that customer feedback is the biggest influence on consumers when they’re making a first purchase.
• Be transparent about costs and shipping times with upfront pricing. Include delivery fees, taxes, etc., so shoppers know exactly what to expect.
• Offer an AI customer agent that can answer common questions about products, delivery, sizing, store policies, payment, and more. This way, shoppers can get quick answers and add products to their cart directly from the chat.
• Add personalized AI product recommendations to your customer hub, email automations, and text message flows.

Flame-free fragrance brand Happy Wax discovered their audience is receptive to their new AI customer agent. In just 90 days, over 50% of conversations handled by the AI agent were fully resolved without any service team involvement, says Rachel Fagan, vice-president of marketing at Happy Wax.

With the AI agent, customers get instant answers, reducing support ticket volume and giving the Happy Wax team more “bandwidth for high-touch moments”—both of which build trust before check-out.

3. Personalize abandoned cart recovery flows with customer data

Use customer data from past purchases, browsing behavior, and cart value to make your abandoned cart flows feel more relevant to the context of the decision to buy.

Here are a few ways to make your abandoned cart flows more personal to the shopper:

• Personalize flows based on cart value. High-value carts warrant extra attention because of their higher revenue potential. Use trigger splits to activate incentives like free expedited shipping or discounts when a cart value exceeds a certain threshold. Focus on these carts first to recover the largest potential orders and maximize ROI.
• Retarget shoppers based on intent. Shoppers who browsed a product page 5x in one week and abandoned a cart are different from those who glanced at a product page, added an item to their cart, then left. Online behaviors like this reflect different levels of intent.
• Customize flows based on browsing behavior and past purchases. Use conditional splits—“if-then” rules that set up different messages for different shoppers—to send messages that change depending on conditions. For instance, if a customer abandons a one-item cart, your reminder message might focus on that product’s benefits while highlighting other items they browsed. If your customer abandons multiple items, your message might offer bundle deals that complement past purchases.
• Personalize flow timing based on engagement data. It’s a general best practice to send abandoned cart reminders within 2–4 hours of abandonment. But a great way to increase engagement is to use customer data to personalize send times within that window based on when each shopper is most likely to act.
• Send messages on subscribers’ preferred channel. Use AI-powered channel affinity to send abandoned cart messages on the channels where customers are most likely to convert. Start with their most preferred channel and follow up with their second most preferred.
• Reach shoppers who engage with mobile. If you’ve collected phone numbers and consent, incorporate WhatsApp and text messages into abandoned cart flows.

Coffee brand Grind addresses intent in their abandoned cart flows by creating different versions for shoppers who abandon one-off purchases vs. those who abandon subscriptions. Their abandoned cart series is their highest revenue-generating flow, driving a 12.3% conversion rate.

Beauty technology brand CurrentBody, meanwhile, has turned their abandoned cart recovery efforts into a major revenue driver. By testing timing, messaging, and incentives across multiple flows, they personalize follow-ups based on product type and customer behavior.

CurrentBody’s abandoned cart messages include trust-building elements like before-and-after photos, press mentions, and reviews. And text message reminders—sent only to opted-in subscribers, of course—achieved the highest click rates in the sequence.

4. Use incentives strategically

Abandoned cart incentives require some strategy. On the one hand, you want to encourage conversions with a discount. On the other, you’re a small business that needs to protect margins.

When your marketing automation lives in the same platform as your customer data, you can make the most of your incentives without breaking the bank. That starts with the understanding that not every abandoned cart is equal.

Here are a few ways to make the most of incentives without compromising your profits:

• Send discounts or free shipping incentives only to shoppers with high-value carts, repeat website visits, or high message engagement.
• Send discounts only when the first reminder fails to yield a conversion.
• Create urgency with personalized discount codes that come with an expiry date. A countdown timer or on-site reminder can push shoppers to complete their purchase before time runs out.
• Think beyond discounts. Free returns, loyalty points, cheaper bundle options, or free shipping can all work without hurting your margins.

Jewelry brand Manly Bands uses an abandoned cart survey to split their reminders and offer discounts only to those who answer. The brand asks, “Why didn’t you want to buy?” Customers who respond get a personalized follow-up with a coupon.

Manly Bands has seen great results from this flow, with a placed order rate 4.8x the median for their peer group, according to Klaviyo benchmarks.

Turn abandoned carts into growth with Klaviyo B2C CRM

Reducing abandoned carts is a comprehensive effort across the customer lifecycle. Marketing needs to align with customer support teams to build trust with customers.

Klaviyo is the AI-first B2C CRM that helps you do it all, with:

• K:AI Customer Agent: Trained on your storefront, this AI agent provides shoppers with 24/7 assistance, including quick answers about product details and personalized product recommendations across web chat, email, text messaging, and WhatsApp.
• Flows AI: This AI can add some necessary complexity to your abandoned cart flows by making it easy to add conditional elements from a simple text prompt.
• Klaviyo Customer Hub: This self-service portal makes it easy for customers to wishlist items and see what they left behind, so they can quickly return and finish their purchase.

Ready to start converting abandoned carts into growth opportunities