Checkout friction is losing you two-thirds of your filled carts
The statistic is brutal but well-established: roughly two in three online shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. For Dutch and Belgian merchants heading into the peak season, that number deserves serious attention. The causes are not mysterious, and the fixes are largely within reach.
The article, drawing on input from the Wix eCommerce team, groups abandonment into three clusters: user friction, site performance, and shopping behaviour. The first cluster is where merchants have the most direct leverage. Forced account creation remains one of the most damaging checkout patterns still in active use. Guest checkout is not a nice-to-have; it is a baseline expectation. Alongside that, form optimisation, localised shipping options, and visible return policies consistently move conversion needles in controlled tests.
Site performance is the second lever. A page that loads in one second reportedly converts at three times the rate of one that takes five seconds. For merchants on shared hosting or running unoptimised image stacks, this is low-hanging fruit. Dutch consumers in particular have high expectations around page speed, shaped by years of using fast, stripped-back checkout flows from the country’s dominant players.
The third category, shopping behaviour, is worth acknowledging but should not become an excuse for inaction. Yes, some shoppers use carts as wishlists. But many of those same shoppers can be converted with a well-timed reminder, a persistent cart across devices, or a single-click return path. Mobile checkout continuity matters here: a cart started on a phone and abandoned is often a genuine purchase intent that simply lost momentum.
For merchants operating in the Netherlands and Belgium, the holiday run-up is the worst possible time to discover that your checkout flow has structural problems. Audit your guest checkout path, check your mobile form experience, and confirm that your return policy is visible before the payment step, not buried in the footer. These are not optimisation experiments; they are conversion hygiene.
Source: wix.com
