A lost cart costs one order, a lost customer costs every order after it
Checkout teams measure abandonment per session: a shopper fills a cart, does not pay, and the dashboard counts one lost order. A shopper survey by SCAYLE, the commerce platform, asks a different question. Carried out by YouGov among 1,583 US online shoppers between 21 and 28 January 2025, it found that 81% had abandoned a brand in the previous year. That is not a cart left behind. It is a customer who stopped buying, and no checkout report shows it.
The survey does not measure whether those shoppers returned later, and it does not claim that a single bad moment was always the cause. Read it for what it is: a list of reasons shoppers give for walking away from a brand. What makes the list useful is how many of those reasons are decided in the checkout or the pages around it.
Several reasons for leaving a brand are set in the checkout
Product quality tops the list, and no checkout change fixes a product shoppers do not like. Below it, the reasons move into territory the checkout controls. Long delivery times, a bad online shopping experience and not being able to pay with the payment method they prefer all appear among the main reasons shoppers give. SCAYLE’s own write-up of the survey also blames fees the shopper did not see coming, too few ways to pay and return rules that are hard to follow.
Each of these is a decision the shop made and shows to the shopper at a specific moment. The delivery promise appears on the product page and again in the checkout. Fees appear when the total is calculated. Payment methods appear on the payment step. Return terms appear before the order, if the shop chooses to show them there, or after it, when the shopper needs them. A shopper who meets a disappointment at one of those moments does not only abandon that cart. The survey answers suggest that some of them stop considering the brand at all.
The payment step is a brand moment, not a technical one
A missing payment method is usually treated as a conversion problem on one screen. The survey puts it among reasons for leaving a brand, which is a heavier verdict. The shopper who does not find their method concludes that this shop is not set up for them, and remembers that the next time an ad appears.
The respondents are US shoppers, so the methods they have in mind are not the ones a Dutch shopper looks for. The mechanism carries over. In the Netherlands the shopper looks for iDEAL, which has carried the co-branding iDEAL | Wero since earlier in 2026, as EPI confirmed in July. A Dutch shopper who finds neither name on the payment step draws the same conclusion as the US respondents. A shop selling across borders meets the same expectation in every market with a different local method, and in each market the shopper reads its absence the same way.
Payment flexibility also shows up on the loyalty side of the survey. Asked about loyalty programme benefits, 36% of shoppers named free shipping and buy now, pay later, and 25% free returns. Shoppers do not separate the payment step and the returns policy from the brand. They experience them as part of how the shop treats them, and they reward or punish the whole brand accordingly.
Measure the customers you lose, not only the carts
Cart abandonment rates will not show brand abandonment, because the customer who left after a late delivery or a refund that took three weeks completed the order. The loss appears only in the next order that never comes. To see it, follow first-time customers through to their second purchase and compare groups: customers whose order arrived later than promised against those whose order arrived on time, customers who paid with a fallback method because their first choice was missing against those who found it, and customers who returned an item and waited for the refund against those who kept what they bought.
Those comparisons need no new tools, only order data you already hold: promised and actual delivery dates, payment method, return and refund dates. The gaps between groups show which part of the checkout and post-purchase experience is costing you repeat customers, and they tend to point at concrete fixes. A delivery promise that is too optimistic, a fee that appears only on the last step, a payment method missing in one market, a refund that waits until the return has been fully processed.
Take your first-time customers from six to twelve months ago and split them on those three factors: delivery on time or late, preferred method or fallback, and returned with a refund or kept. Compare the share in each group that placed a second order. Fix the factor with the largest gap first, and repeat the comparison each quarter.
Sources: scayle.com, retaildive.com and epicompany.eu
