E-commerce

Seven carts in ten are abandoned, and that is not inevitable

The average cart abandonment rate sits at around 70% — a figure that has been remarkably stable for twenty years according to Baymard Institute's compiled studies. It runs higher on mobile than on desktop.

Most of those abandonments are not about price. They are about the checkout: forced account creation, an endless form, costs revealed too late. Baymard's work on checkout usability alone puts the conversion gain available to an average large merchant at more than 30%, without touching the catalogue or the advertising budget.

It is the best effort-to-result ratio in your whole acquisition chain. A campaign costs on every click; a checkout fixed once works every day.

The four leaks in a checkout

• Forced account creation. One of the leading causes of abandonment. Guest checkout, with an account offered after payment, removes the obstacle without giving up the customer record.
• Costs revealed late. Shipping, VAT, customs: presented at the final step, they undo a purchase decision already made. They belong in the cart, and ideally on the product page.
• The over-long form. Most checkouts ask for considerably more fields than they need. Every field removed is an abandonment avoided: address autocomplete, merged fields, options hidden by default.
• Doubt at the moment of paying. Expected payment methods, readable return terms, a stated delivery date. Uncertainty costs more than price.

The Swiss market has its own requirements

A checkout designed for France or Germany fails in Switzerland on details that are not details:

• TWINT is expected by a large share of Swiss buyers. Its absence reads as a lack of seriousness.
• The QR-bill has replaced the old payment slips. Paying on invoice remains a strong habit, particularly in B2B.
• Three languages and two buying cultures. A translated checkout is not a localised one: delivery and payment expectations differ between linguistic regions.
• VAT, customs and cross-border delivery. To be handled in the displayed total, not in the terms and conditions.

Decoupling the storefront, when it is warranted

A headless architecture — a commerce engine on one side, a custom-built interface on the other — gives real freedom over experience and performance. It also gives you one more system to maintain.

It is warranted when the catalogue is complex, when the buying experience is part of your differentiation, or when the shop has to connect to an existing ERP that is authoritative for stock and pricing.

It is not warranted for a simple catalogue on a platform that already does the job. We say so when that is the case.

Measure the funnel, not the traffic

Traffic is vanity while the funnel leaks. We instrument every step — product view, add to cart, checkout start, delivery details, payment, confirmation — to identify the exact step where the loss occurs.

That measurement sets the priorities, not an intuition about a button colour. A fix is validated on before-and-after figures, measured on the same population.