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A shopper adds something to a cart, gets most of the way through checkout, and then leaves. This is called cart abandonment. It happens on roughly seven out of every 10 online carts, and it's happened at almost exactly that rate for more than a decade despite a mountain of checkout redesigns aimed at stopping it.
Baymard Institute has tracked the global cart abandonment rate for 14 years across 50 studies, and it currently sits at 70.19% to 70.22%, essentially unmoved despite a decade of checkout usability work. Their own research splits the reasons into two groups. One is fixable friction: extra costs, forced account creation, slow delivery, payment trust concerns. The other is that 42% of US shoppers say they abandoned simply because they weren't ready to buy yet.
The problem doesn't exist solely at the checkout; many shoppers have questions but no place to ask them.
What 70% Cart Abandonment Hides
A number that stable for that long usually means the industry has been solving an incomplete version of the problem.
Ecommerce teams have spent a decade shortening checkout flows, adding guest checkout, surfacing shipping costs earlier, and simplifying payment forms. Baymard's own data shows the fixes that work include
- Reducing form fields
- Offering guest checkout
- Showing total cost upfront
These all measurably reduce abandonment tied to those specific frictions, but none of that work touches the 42% who say they simply weren't ready.
At first glance, "Not ready" sounds like a shrug, the kind of answer a shopper gives when they don't want to explain themselves. However, it's often a stalled decision, where something is still unresolved, and the checkout page, no matter how well designed, doesn't ask what it is.
The Pre-Purchase Questions a Checkout Page Never Asks
A checkout form is only there to collect payment and shipping details as efficiently as possible. It has no field for "will this actually fit me," "does this work with what I already own," or "is the difference between this and the cheaper option worth it."
Those are pre-purchase questions, and they make up a real share of that 42%. A shopper adds a jacket to their cart, gets to the payment page, and pauses, not because the form is broken, but because they still don't know if it runs small. Removing form fields doesn't answer that question. Neither does a faster page load or a more prominent guest checkout button.
This is the same gap that shows up in what buyers ask before they buy. Every measurement system in performance marketing records that something happened, whether it's an impression, click, or cart addition. None of them record why a shopper stalled, which means the actual content of that 42% has stayed invisible to the industry that's spent a decade trying to fix it.
Why Fixing Checkout Friction Only Solves Half the Problem
Baymard's reason-code breakdown makes the split explicit:
- 40% cite extra costs
- 20% cite slow delivery
- 19% don't trust the site with card details
- 18% don't want to create an account
- 17% find checkout too complicated
- 13% aren't satisfied with the returns policy
Every one of those is genuinely fixable with better checkout design, and brands should keep fixing them. But stack them against the 42% who weren't ready, and you're looking at two different populations that need two different remedies. One needs a shorter form. The other needs an answer to a question the form was never designed to receive.
Treating both groups the same, polishing checkout UX and hoping it eventually catches the undecided shoppers too, is a reasonable explanation for why the abandonment rate has held near 70% for more than a decade. The friction fixes work on friction. They don't touch doubt.
For example, let's say two shoppers hit the same checkout page on the same day. The first abandons because the site demanded an account before checkout, a real, fixable, well-documented friction point. The second abandons because they're still not sure the coat will be warm enough for where they live, and nothing on the page addresses that.
The first shopper can be saved simply by fixing account creation. The second one leaves exactly the same way they would have before the fix, because the obstacle they faced wasn't on the page in the first place.
How Pre-Purchase Questions Get Answered Before the Cart, Not After
The fix isn't a better checkout page, but answering the question before the shopper ever gets that far.
Linka prices exactly this moment through cost per DM. When a shopper comments a keyword on a creator's post asking whether a jacket runs small, ships in time, or works for a specific use case, a tracked direct message answers it immediately, before the shopper has opened a cart at all. That qualified DM is a compensable event on its own, independent of whether the eventual purchase can be tracked through a link.
This method can address a significant share of the 42% who abandon because they weren't ready never make it far enough into checkout for any tracking tool to see them stall. They close the tab, they leave the app, and no cart-recovery email can reach a cart that was never started.
A qualified DM captures the moment they doubt making the purchase, which is earlier and more useful than anything reaching out after the fact. Where the purchase does happen through a trackable path, a dynamic discount conversion page carries the product, the answer, and the offer through to checkout, and affiliate commission stacks on top of the qualified DM.
This doesn't replace checkout optimization, and brands should keep doing both. What it adds is coverage for the larger, still-unaddressed half of shoppers who were never going to be saved by a faster form, because the form was never what stopped them.
Stop Losing Sales to Pre-Purchase Questions Nobody Asked
Roughly 70% cart abandonment has held steady through a decade of checkout redesigns because a meaningful part of the problem was never in the checkout at all. It sat one step earlier, in a question nobody gave the shopper the means to ask questions.
The fix isn't complicated, and it doesn't require ripping out a checkout flow that mostly works. It requires catching the question at the moment it exists, in a comment or a DM, rather than hoping the shopper voices it on a support form after they've already left. Every day that gap stays open is another batch of shoppers filed under "just browsing" who were closer to a purchase than that label suggests.
Ready to stop losing sales to pre-purchase questions nobody asked? Book a call with Linka or explore Linka's affiliate marketing platform for brands to see what capturing the other 42% actually looks like.
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