The usual leaks
Shipping charges turn up at the final step, after the cart had shown a lower total, and this is the big one everywhere, though it bites even harder in India, where price sensitivity right at the checkout runs especially high. Show shipping in the cart. Or build it into the price and tell people delivery is included.
Forced account creation. Guest checkout should be the default, every time. Nobody wants to make a password just to buy a candle.
Payment friction is next. UPI needs to be prominent, ideally the first option, because a huge share of Indian shoppers reach for it. If your Razorpay or Shopify Payments setup shows cards first and drops UPI three options down the list, you are losing real orders to nothing more than a layout choice.
Then the smaller leaks. Long forms asking for fields you do not actually need. A COD option missing entirely when your customers clearly expect one. Slow page loads on mobile data. And no visible trust signals, so a first-time buyer hesitates before typing card details into a store they met barely an hour ago.
Finding your specific problem
Do not guess at this. Shopify lays out the funnel from cart to checkout to payment to purchase, and the step with the steepest drop is your answer sitting in plain sight. A big fall between checkout started and payment info entered usually points to cost or trust, while a fall at the payment step itself usually means a method or a gateway problem instead.
Watch session recordings of abandoned checkouts, if you have a tool that captures them. Ten recordings teach you more than a month of theorising, and you will nearly always catch something concrete. A validation error on the phone field. A coupon box that fails in silence. A button that sits below the fold on smaller phones.
Then buy from your own store, on your own phone, paying with your own money, over mobile data. Do it every month. Founders who actually do this keep finding problems that not one customer had bothered to report.
Recovering the ones you lose
Some abandonment is simply permanent. Run recovery flows anyway. A WhatsApp message within the hour, then a reminder the next day, each one carrying a direct link straight back to the filled cart, and keep the discount for that second message rather than the first, or you quietly train people to abandon on purpose.
Track recovered revenue on its own. Track completion rate too, month on month. That single percentage is one of the most valuable numbers in the whole business, because every point you gain applies to traffic you have already paid to bring in.
Related questions: How much should a D2C brand spend on marketing? · How do I compete with a bigger brand on the same keywords? · How do I reduce RTO on COD orders?.
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Unexpected costs at the last step cause more abandonment than anything else, followed by forced account creation and a payment method the customer wanted but could not find. Someone who reached checkout had already decided to buy. They were ready. Whatever stopped them happened right there on that page, which is exactly why this is the cheapest problem in your whole store to go and fix.
It varies widely by category and by traffic source, so the only benchmark that really matters is your own trend line. Track completion rate monthly. Investigate any sharp change, because a sudden move usually points to something broken rather than a real shift in how customers behave.
In the second or third message, not the first. Never the first one. An immediate discount teaches your repeat customers to abandon on purpose, so try a plain reminder paired with a genuine reassurance about returns or delivery timing before you give away any margin.
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