How We Reduced Cart Abandonment by 35% for a Fashion Brand

Cart abandonment is the silent revenue killer for most ecommerce businesses. Our client, a women's fashion brand based in London, was converting at 1.1% against an industry average of 1.8%. Their Google Analytics showed carts being added at healthy rates — the breakdown was happening between cart and completed purchase. We were brought in to find out why and fix it.

What the Data Showed

Three weeks of session recording analysis and funnel tracking revealed a consistent pattern. Users were dropping off at two specific points: the shipping cost reveal on the cart page, and the account creation prompt on the checkout page. Both were solvable problems — but they required changes the in-house team hadn't prioritised.

Interventions We Made

1. 1Added a free delivery progress bar to the cart drawer, displayed once users reached 75% of the £50 free delivery threshold.
2. 2Replaced the mandatory account creation prompt with a guest checkout as the default path.
3. 3Added trust badges (Trustpilot rating, secure payment, free returns) above the checkout button.
4. 4Implemented a sticky checkout button on mobile so it remained visible while scrolling product images.
5. 5Rebuilt the abandoned cart email sequence from a single email to a three-step flow over 24 hours.

The Email Recovery Sequence

The original abandoned cart email went out at one hour with a generic subject line. We rebuilt it as a three-step sequence: a one-hour reminder showing the abandoned items, a six-hour email highlighting the free returns policy, and a 24-hour email with a 10% time-limited discount. Open rates on the new sequence were 41% against 18% for the original single email.

Results After Eight Weeks

• Cart abandonment rate fell from 74% to 48% — a 35% reduction.
• Checkout completion rate improved from 26% to 52%.
• Abandoned cart email recovery generated an additional £12,400 in the first month.
• Average order value increased by £18 due to the free delivery progress bar driving higher basket sizes.
• Overall store conversion rate improved from 1.1% to 1.7%.

“I knew we had an abandonment problem but I didn't realise how fixable it was. The changes were logical — we just needed someone to make the case.”