According to research, on average 70% of shoppers add items to their cart and leave without completing the purchase. In WooCommerce, this is especially noticeable because the standard checkout is overloaded with fields, inconvenient on mobile devices, and often contains technical errors.
In this article, we will explore why this happens and what specifically helps to fix the situation.
- Why Customers Abandon Their Cart: Main Reasons
- 1. Too Long and Complicated Checkout Form
- 2. Errors When Entering Address
- 3. No Clear Shipping Cost Calculation
- 4. Inconvenient Shipping Method Selection
- 5. No Separation Between Individuals and Legal Entities
- 6. Slow Site Performance or Errors
- 7. No Saved Cart
- What Really Increases Checkout Conversion
- Do You Need Custom Development or Is a Plugin Enough?
- Conclusion
Why Customers Abandon Their Cart: Main Reasons
1. Too Long and Complicated Checkout Form
The standard WooCommerce checkout contains 10–15 fields: first name, last name, address, city, postal code, country, phone, email, and so on. Most of these must be filled out manually by the customer.
The more fields there are, the higher the chance that the person will simply close the tab. Especially if they are on a phone.
What helps: reduce the number of required fields to a minimum, hide secondary fields, or fill them in automatically.
2. Errors When Entering Address
The customer enters the address manually: gets confused with street names, writes “city” instead of the actual city name, forgets the postal code. As a result, the order arrives with an incorrect address, and the manager spends time clarifying it.
But even more often, the customer simply abandons the form halfway because they don’t know how to fill out the field correctly.
What helps: enable address autofill through a service like DaData. The customer starts typing the first letters of the city or street — the system suggests options and fills in the rest automatically.
3. No Clear Shipping Cost Calculation
If the shipping cost only appears at the end of the checkout process — it’s an unpleasant surprise. Many customers leave at this step.
According to Baymard Institute research, unexpected costs in checkout are the number one reason for abandoned carts.
What helps: show the shipping cost as early as possible, calculate it automatically based on the customer’s address, offer free shipping over a certain amount.
4. Inconvenient Shipping Method Selection
If you have CDEK, Russian Post, or another service connected — the customer must choose a pickup point or address. In the standard WooCommerce implementation, this often works with errors: the map doesn’t load, pickup points don’t appear, calculation freezes.
What helps: use an improved shipping module that correctly pulls pickup points, automatically detects the city, and doesn’t produce errors during calculation.
5. No Separation Between Individuals and Legal Entities
If your store works with B2B, corporate clients need additional fields: tax ID, company name, billing details. But showing these fields to everyone else causes unnecessary stress for regular customers.
What helps: make checkout logic depend on the customer type. Individuals see a minimal form, legal entities see an expanded form with the necessary fields.
6. Slow Site Performance or Errors
If the checkout page loads slowly, fields freeze, or JS errors appear — the customer won’t wait. They will leave.
What helps: check the checkout page loading speed (Google PageSpeed Insights), remove unnecessary plugins that add scripts to all pages, optimize the database.
7. No Saved Cart
The customer added items, got distracted, closed the browser. When they return — the cart is empty. This is especially critical for expensive or complex orders where the person takes a long time to decide.
What helps: set up cart storage for unregistered users, remind about abandoned carts via email.
What Really Increases Checkout Conversion
To summarize — here’s what works in practice:
Address Autofill. Connecting DaData reduces the time to fill address fields several times and eliminates errors. The customer starts typing the street — the form fills itself. This is especially noticeable on mobile devices.
Multi-step Checkout. Instead of one long page — several short steps: contacts, address, shipping, payment. Psychologically, this is easier: the person moves forward rather than facing an endless form.
Separation of Individuals and Legal Entities. Different scenarios for different customers. Individuals see a simple form, legal entities see an expanded one with tax ID and billing details.
Proper Shipping Functionality. Especially relevant for CDEK: auto city selection, correct calculation, a proper map with pickup point selection.
Remove Unnecessary Fields. Company, address line 2, fax — often unnecessary. The fewer fields, the higher the conversion.
Do You Need Custom Development or Is a Plugin Enough?
It depends on the complexity of the task.
If you just need to remove unnecessary fields or add autofill — a ready-made plugin will do. Installation takes a few minutes, and configuration is intuitive.
If you need logic for individuals/legal entities, multi-step checkout, integration with specific shipping and payment services — that’s custom development. But the result will perfectly fit your project, rather than being a compromise between “what’s needed” and “what the plugin can do.”
Conclusion
Abandoned carts are not just “customers changed their minds.” Most often, it’s due to an inconvenient form, unclear shipping, or technical problems that can be fixed.
Even small changes in checkout — removing unnecessary fields, adding autofill, fixing shipping calculation — noticeably affect the number of completed orders.
If you want to improve the checkout on your store — write about your task, and we’ll see what can be improved.
