6 ways to reduce ecommerce cart abandonment

Knowing how to fix a high ecommerce cart abandonment rate can mean the difference between a minor frustration and a major financial drain for online retailers.

The internet is now many people’s first destination when shopping. In the run-up to Christmas 2025, UK consumers were more than twice as likely to buy gifts online than from a festive fair or supermarket:[1]

Where do UK consumers shop for gifts?

While it is a fact of life that some shoppers will leave your site without checking out the contents of their cart, there are still steps you can take to optimise your basket checkout rate.

Doing so directly increases your revenues by reducing incomplete sales, and can also have beneficial effects on order size and repeat custom.

The ecommerce opportunity is out there

With nearly half (47%) of Christmas shoppers in 2025 looking to purchase from multiple websites – slightly more than the 46% who preferred to complete their shopping on a single site – the opportunity is out there.[2]

As we move through 2026, here are six ways to reduce abandoned carts in ecommerce:

1. Offer personalised discount codes

2. Optimise your pick, pack and despatch

3. Improve your delivery and return options

4. Accept alternative payment methods

5. Make better use of data and embrace AI

6. Find a reliable ecommerce logistics provider

In this guide, we will look at each of these methods in more detail, backed by research to help you judge the positive impact our six-step plan could have on your ecommerce business.

1. Offer personalised discount codes

Discount codes in general are a good way to drive ecommerce order completion. Compared with other methods, they rank highly as a means to win back customers who have started to look elsewhere:[3]

How many consumers will consider coming back?

This makes a relatively small discount an effective way to appeal to half of customers who have strayed away from your site, versus more costly methods like raising the quality of your goods.

Generic vs unique coupon codes

Ecommerce voucher codes can be generic (e.g. XMAS10 for a 10% discount on Christmas shopping) or unique, single-use codes given to individual customers on your marketing list.

Both generic and unique discount codes show measurable benefits for ecommerce sites, lifting clickthrough and conversion rates when included in email marketing campaigns. But unique codes deliver much greater increases in selling price and order size.

Metric	No code	Generic code	Unique code
Clickthrough rate	0.930%	0.811%	1.067%
Conversion rate	0.078%	0.082%	0.079%
Average selling price		+5.0%	+138.6%
Average order value		-4.1%	+33.2%

Table 1: 2024-25 email marketing outcomes with discount codes. Source: Seguno.[4]

If you want immediate impact, Seguno’s five-year survey of Shopify users found that generic codes offer more rapid returns. Resending a generic code to your mailing list a second time further reinforces this, raising revenues by a further 25.4%.[5]

Finally, Seguno recommend targeting your most motivated customers with premium SKUs and product bundles – which ties into the rising popularity of kitting and subscription boxes that we’ve seen in recent months.

2. Optimise your pick, pack and despatch

An efficient warehouse operation has broad-brush benefits across your business. Pick, pack and despatch is an area where many of MRM’s ecommerce clients look to us for help.

Modern-day ecommerce is a highly fluid supply chain, from manufacturers and wholesalers, to online retailers, and through to the customer’s door, post office or drop-off locker.

Reliable order picking and despatch ensures that you can ship the correct items within the agreed delivery timeframe – enabling attractive options like next-day delivery and reducing the risk of returns.

How to tackle warehouse inefficiencies

One in three businesses report inefficient warehouse processes, which means goods move more slowly, associated costs rise and profits decrease.[6]

Addressing these problematic processes delivers a range of compelling benefits:[7]

While not directly visible to consumers, improving your pick, pack and despatch processes underpins everything else on this list, enabling you to offer premium bundles, respond to incoming orders faster, collect better data from your warehouse and customers, and prevent lost profits due to returned items.

“Warehousing is an essential part of the supply chain, used for stock management, meeting customer demands, and fulfilling supply orders efficiently… Given its importance, it is pivotal that challenges in this industry are addressed as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

– Aurora Insights, Warehousing 2024: Exclusive analysis of UK and international warehousing[8]

3. Improve your delivery and return options

An efficient warehouse puts you in a better position to offer next-day delivery and crucially, to give your customers more choice about how and when they receive their items, reducing the reasons why they might abandon their cart.

The GFS/Retail Economics Battling Basket Abandonment Report 2025 puts the cost of failed deliveries at more than £38 billion per year in the UK. Disillusioned customers are voting with their feet, as basket abandonment rose by 12.2% in the year.[9]

This follows 2024’s report which claimed UK ecommerce is facing a “zero-tolerance era” and added: “Delivery and returns are now indispensable aspects of the online shopping experience, not mere conveniences.”[10]

In the 2025 update, one statistic speaks volumes: Two out of three frequent online shoppers abandon their cart at least once a month because they don’t like the available delivery options.[11]

What delivery options do UK ecommerce customers want?

Research from KPMG in 2025 found that over two fifths (42%) of UK consumers have abandoned an online purchase because the retailer didn’t offer free shipping and/or free returns.[12]

Setting a minimum order size to qualify for free shipping can be harmful too, with a very close correlation between the abandonment rates arising from each issue:

This tracks with our own experience. We’ve found that many consumers value a flexible returns policy as much as convenient delivery options – and will go elsewhere if they don’t think you meet their expectations during the checkout process.

“Free delivery, or free and convenient returns options, remain a key purchasing driver for many consumers shopping online.”

– Linda Ellett, head of consumer, retail and leisure, KPMG UK[13]

4. Accept alternative payment methods

It goes without saying that if you make it easier to pay, you’re less likely to lose customers who want to complete their transaction in a certain way.

How many people use alternative payment methods?

In August 2024, the FCA reported that 62% of UK consumers have used a ‘non-traditional’ payment method, such as mobile payments or PayPal.[14]

Why do UK consumers prefer a payment method?

The FCA also asked what encouraged people to choose a specific payment method over the alternatives. Interestingly, the security of the transaction was a concern for less than a fifth of respondents:[15]

1. Convenience: 45%

2. Ease of use: 41%

3. Speed of checkout: 35%

4. Safety/security: 19%

5. Redress/refunds: 11%

How important is security in online payment processing?

Security still matters. In a separate report from Mintel, 59% of consumers said they worry more about digital payments than in-store purchases.[16] Ecommerce operators should take steps to work with a trusted payments processor and highlight this fact to customers during checkout.

5. Make better use of data and embrace AI

Collecting and analysing data about orders, warehouse operations and customer profiles is a recurring theme throughout much of the research already mentioned above.

Aurora Insights found nearly 40% of warehousing problems arise from poor data quality, or no data collection at all. The report also found that one in four businesses were embracing AI as a way to tackle these challenges.[17]

KPMG also recommended the use of AI to identify customers of value, and to weed out the 12-13% of shoppers who knowingly buy items they intend to return, once they’ve tried them on for size or style.[18]

How AI can improve checkout rates

AI has been shown to predict cart abandonment rates with nearly 90% accuracy, based on shoppers’ on-site behaviour prior to the checkout process.[19]

This study, published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, went beyond basic browsing habits to include dynamic elements such as shoppers shifting between categories, variations in price, and particularly those consumers who added items to their shopping basket but did not complete their purchase.[20]

“By incorporating these dynamic features into machine learning models, companies can not only increase the accuracy of predicting purchase behaviours once items are added to the cart, but also enhance the overall customer experience through more individualised and responsive approaches.”

– Ramazan Esmeli and Aytac Gokce, JTAER 20:1, February 2025[21]

6. Find a reliable ecommerce logistics provider

To implement all of the above, you need a highly capable multichannel ecommerce logistics partner like MRM. We have expertise across each of the areas discussed in this guide:

1. Money-off coupons

2. Warehousing and storage

3. Domestic and international despatch

4. Ecommerce payment processing

5. Integrated campaign data collection

6. Proven end-to-end ecommerce fulfilment

Optimisation, by definition, means making your processes the best they can be, maximising your efficiency and increasing customer checkout rates – and that works best when you tackle the diverse range of challenges that exist throughout the ecommerce ecosystem.

With MRM as your one-stop ecommerce logistics provider, you can cut through the complexity and delight your customers at every step, to provide them with the flexible and flowing checkout process they need to complete their purchase.