By Justin Pike, founder and CEO of Burbank
Every online merchant knows the pain of seeing a full shopping cart turn into nothing. Each abandoned cart represents lost revenue, and it happens more often than most people realise.
The usual culprits are easy to name: shipping costs, pricing, distraction. But from a technical standpoint, the real issue lies elsewhere – the checkout itself.
If the user experience feels slow, clunky or confusing, customers leave. If fraud filters wrongly block a genuine customer, they leave. If the site makes them re-enter details or has too many steps, they leave. Every abandoned cart is money gone, plain and simple.
Industry research tells the story:
- 18% of shoppers abandon their carts because checkout is too long or complicated
- 17% abandon because they don’t trust the site with their card details
- 13% because of website crashes and errors
- Another 9% because their preferred payment method isn’t available.
That is billions in lost sales every year, and the hidden cost isn’t just the sale itself, but the trust and repeat business that vanish with it. Once a customer is blocked or frustrated at checkout, they rarely come back.
Where checkouts go wrong
We see the same pattern over and over. Merchants focus on getting people onto their site and filling a basket, but then neglect the final mile. Checkout is where the deal is won or lost. You can spend millions getting people to your site, but if the payment experience fails, that spend is wasted.
Fraud filters are one of the biggest culprits. On paper, they protect merchants, but in reality, they often protect no one. A filter that’s too aggressive doesn’t just stop fraudsters, it stops genuine buyers too. These false positives erode confidence and create churn.
Imagine being a loyal customer and suddenly your card gets declined for no good reason. You aren’t going to try again three times, you’re going to walk away. Likely for good.
This is where smarter solutions are needed. Fraud detection should be invisible to the good customer and only visible to the bad actor. That requires better technology, better data and better partnerships. Merchants can’t do this alone, and neither can fintechs. But together, they can build systems that separate risk from revenue, keeping the checkout smooth without letting fraud in.
The psychology of checkout
At the point of payment, confidence is everything. Customers don’t want to feel uncertain or out of control. Every extra screen or delay is a chance to rethink the purchase.
When a checkout feels clean and familiar, it builds trust. It reassures customers that their details are safe and that their payment will go through. That’s why merchants who invest in optimising the last step consistently see higher conversions. It’s not complicated, it’s simply removing the reasons for hesitation.
Checkout abandonment isn’t inevitable. It’s a design, trust, and technology problem and all three can be solved.
The opportunity hiding in plain sight
Recovering even a small fraction of abandoned carts could deliver billions in additional revenue. To a smaller retailer, this could be the difference between survival and growth.
Think about the difference that would make for a retailer heading into peak season, or an airline ahead of summer travel. Instead of spending more to acquire new customers, they could capture more value from the ones already ready to buy. It’s a more efficient growth lever that’s so often overlooked.
What next?
In payments, simplicity wins. The goal isn’t to over-engineer checkout, it’s to make it feel natural, trustworthy, and intuitive.
Give customers a checkout that works the first time. Strengthen fraud detection through smart partnerships, not extra friction. Test the process the way a real customer would, and remember that every extra click or error message has a cost attached to it.
The hidden cost of checkout abandonment isn’t just the sale you lost today. It is the repeat business you will never see tomorrow. The slow leak of trust that turns loyalty into attrition.
Merchants who accept that as “just the cost of doing business online” will keep losing quietly. Those who fix it will win loudly. The technology exists, the insights are there, what’s needed now is the will to make checkout as much a priority as marketing or product.
When that happens, the returns will speak for themselves.
