Short answer
Cart abandonment is a shopper adding items to a basket and leaving before completing payment. A large part of it is mechanical rather than a change of mind: a shipping fee revealed only at the final step, a forced account registration, a missing payment method such as GCash, or a form that will not submit on a phone.
Also called: Basket abandonment, Checkout abandonment
Treating it as one number hides the problem. Browse abandonment, where someone was never close to buying, behaves nothing like checkout abandonment, where someone entered an address and stopped. Instrument each step separately and the drop-off usually localises to a single screen, which turns a vague conversion problem into a specific fix. Recovery emails are worth running, but they are downstream of the step that lost the order in the first place.
Several Philippine specifics are worth checking before anything clever. Traffic skews mobile on connections that are not always fast, so a checkout that only works well on a desktop browser loses orders quietly. Delivery cost surprises hit harder where shipping to a province differs sharply from shipping within Metro Manila, so show it early. And a cash-on-delivery option often converts buyers who will not prepay a seller they do not know yet.
Common questions
What counts as a good cart abandonment rate?
Your own trend is the only benchmark worth acting on. Published averages mix categories, price points and traffic sources that have nothing to do with your store. Measure the rate per step, segment it by device and payment method, and judge changes against your prior baseline rather than against an industry figure.
Do abandoned cart emails work?
They recover some orders, but only if an email address was captured before the shopper left, which means asking for it early in the checkout rather than at the end. They also cannot fix the reason for leaving. Repair the failing step first, then use recovery messages on the residual.
Where this comes up in our work
Related terms
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is the service that carries a customer’s payment details from a checkout to the institutions that authorise and settle the money — card networks, banks, e-wallets.
GCash
GCash is a Philippine mobile wallet operated by G-Xchange, Inc.
Cash on Delivery (COD)
Cash on delivery is a payment arrangement where the buyer pays the courier at the doorstep and the courier remits the proceeds to the merchant later.
Direct-to-Consumer (D2C)
Direct-to-consumer is selling straight to the end customer through channels the brand controls, rather than through distributors, retail chains or marketplace listings.
Reading definitions because you are scoping a project? Skip ahead and just ask.