Cart abandonment is when someone adds a product to their cart and leaves without buying. The Baymard Institute pegs the average rate at 70.19%, and it's been stubbornly consistent for over a decade. That means for every 10 people who show clear purchase intent, 7 walk away.
Most companies respond with abandonment emails. Those help — recovery rates of 5-10% are typical. But they're a band-aid. The real question is why people leave in the first place, and the answer is almost always on the checkout page itself.
The real causes (it's not what you think)
The top reasons from research: unexpected shipping costs (48%), forced account creation (26%), too complicated checkout process (22%), and not trusting the site with payment info (18%). Notice that three of these four are page design decisions, not pricing problems. You can fix them today.
For landing pages that link to checkout flows, the handoff matters enormously. If your landing page promises "free shipping" but the cart shows a shipping line item (even if it says $0), you've introduced doubt. Message consistency from ad to landing page to checkout is where the biggest cart recovery gains hide — not in cleverer email sequences.