Cart abandonment is not a single number

Shop owners often arrive with one figure: how many carts never became orders. That figure is real, and it is also a blend. A visitor who saw a shipping cost for the first time at the last step did not leave for the same reason as a visitor who hit an account wall, or one who chose cash on delivery and never confirmed the courier call.

In briefings we run in Georgia, those three exits sit in the same week more often than not. Card payments through local banks fail for their own reasons — a 3-D Secure prompt on a small phone screen, a limit, a timeout. Mixing them into a single abandonment rate makes the cart look uniformly unwell.

When we draw a Conversion Path Review, we ask for the weeks, then we split what the files allow. Guest versus returning buyer. Card versus cash on delivery. Shipping shown early versus shipping shown after the address. If the files cannot split them, we write that limitation in the note rather than average it away.

If you only have a blended number, start by walking the live checkout twice: once as a guest, once logged in. The screens you pass are the layers. The percentage can wait until those layers have names.