If shoppers are adding products to their carts and nobody is buying, the problem almost always sits in one of four places: your tracking, your checkout, the quality of your traffic, or trust at the moment of payment. Work through them in that order. Adding to cart proves the product and the ad did their job, so resist the urge to rewrite product pages or swap your ad creative first.
This guide is for Australian store owners on Shopify, WooCommerce or similar platforms. It shows what to check, what to fix, and when a gap is normal.
TL;DR
- Add-to-cart without purchase is common. Australian fashion and homewares stores see roughly 69% to 76% cart abandonment, so first work out whether you have a leak or a normal gap.
- Check your tracking before you change anything. A missing or misfiring event can report abandonment that isn’t real.
- Segment by traffic source and device. Mobile social traffic behaves differently from search and email.
- The usual checkout culprits are late shipping costs, forced accounts, missing payment options and policy wording that breaks Australian Consumer Law.
- Recover who you can with abandoned cart emails, but fix the cause so there are fewer carts to recover.
Table of Contents
- First, is it a leak or a normal gap?
- Step 1: Confirm the data is true
- Step 2: Split the problem by source and device
- Step 3: Remove checkout friction
- Step 4: Fix trust and policy signals
- Step 5: Check the traffic itself
- Step 6: Recover the carts you already have
- A worked example of reading the funnel
- Perspective: what we see most often
- When to bring in help
- A four-week action plan
- FAQ
- Sources
First, is it a leak or a normal gap?
Nobody buys on every cart. Plenty of people use the cart as a wish list, a price calculator or a way to see shipping costs.
Published Australian benchmarks give you orientation. For fashion in 2024, EcommerceDB reports a 10.1% add-to-cart rate, 69.2% cart abandonment and a 3.1% conversion rate. For furniture and homewares, the same source shows 9.9% add-to-cart, 75.8% abandonment and 2.4% conversion.
Two things follow from those numbers. A furniture buyer weighing a big purchase will abandon far more often than someone grabbing a t-shirt, so there is no single “good” figure. And definitions differ between datasets. A report from customer experience specialist Humii, covering the Black Friday Cyber Monday period, put Australian cart abandonment at 27 per cent, which is far lower than the benchmark figures above. Different methods, different results. Don’t panic about a number from a blog post.
The figure that matters is your own. Take a 90-day baseline, split by traffic source and device, and judge changes against that. If you have only had a few days of data or a few dozen sessions, you don’t have a leak yet. You have a sample too small to read.
It is a leak when:
- carts are being created at a healthy rate but checkout starts are very low
- checkout starts are healthy but purchases are close to zero
- one device or one source converts at a fraction of the others
- your abandonment suddenly changed after a theme, app, payment or shipping update
For a deeper look at which metrics to track, see our guide to ecommerce performance metrics for Australian stores and our conversion benchmark breakdown.
Step 1: Confirm the data is true
Before touching the storefront, check that analytics is reporting what actually happens. A surprising share of “we have a cart problem” cases are tracking problems.
- Place a real test order. Use a low-priced product, go through every step on your phone and on a desktop, and check that each step appears in your analytics.
- Check the event chain. GA4 uses a set of recommended ecommerce events for measuring sales. If shipping, payment or purchase events are missing or fire in the wrong order, funnel reports show drop-off that never happened.
- Compare with your platform’s own numbers. Your Shopify or WooCommerce orders should roughly match the purchases in GA4 and in your ad platforms. A large gap points to broken tags, consent banners blocking scripts, or a thank-you page that doesn’t load the purchase event.
- Read the checkout funnel. GA4’s Checkout journey report shows how many users began checkout and how many completed each following step, so you can see exactly where people stop.
If you are paying for ads, this step matters twice over. Ad platforms optimise on the purchase signals you send them. Weak or missing signals mean worse targeting next week. We cover the fix in our piece on data-driven ecommerce marketing.
Step 2: Split the problem by source and device
A blended conversion rate hides the real story. Cut your data three ways.
By device
If mobile carts convert at half the rate of desktop, you have a mobile checkout problem. Common causes: tiny tap targets, address forms that don’t autofill, a payment method that works poorly in in-app browsers, or a sticky bar covering the checkout button.
By traffic source
Social traffic often arrives on mobile, in a hurry, and with lower intent than search. Someone clicking a Reel and adding to cart on impulse behaves differently from someone searching for your exact product. Email subscribers usually convert best. If one channel is dragging the average down, that isn’t necessarily a site problem. It may be an audience or offer problem.
By new versus returning customers
New visitors need more reassurance: reviews, clear delivery times, a visible returns policy. Returning customers need speed. If new customers abandon far more, work on trust. If both do, look at friction.
We built our mobile-first Shopify conversion rate approach around this sequence: diagnose by segment, fix the biggest leak, test, then repeat.
Step 3: Remove checkout friction
Once the data is trustworthy and you know where the drop is, these are the usual suspects, roughly in order of how often we see them.
Shipping costs that appear too late
Surprise costs are among the most common reasons people leave. DHL’s e-commerce research makes the point that there is no such thing as truly free delivery or returns, and suggests building the cost into product pricing instead of adding charges at checkout.
In practice for Australian stores:
- Show a shipping estimate or a free-shipping threshold on the product page and in the cart.
- State delivery times by state or postcode where you can. Shoppers in Perth and Darwin know a Sydney warehouse means a longer wait.
- Consider rolling shipping into the price on lower-priced items.
Price transparency is also a legal matter. The ACCC has made card payment surcharges and misleading add-on pricing an enforcement priority, according to a law firm’s summary of its April 2025 reminder to businesses. If your total price only appears at the last step, shoppers feel tricked and regulators may agree.
Forced account creation
Make guest checkout the obvious path. If your store requires an account to pay, switch it off and offer account creation after purchase. Our 60-day Shopify checkout optimisation plan starts here because it is usually fast to fix.
Missing payment options
Australians expect card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and often a buy now, pay later option. If your one gateway fails on certain cards or devices, you lose sales that look like abandonment. Place a test order with each method.
A checkout that is long or confusing
Count the fields. Remove anything you don’t need to fulfil the order, such as a second address line or a company name on a consumer store. Show a clear progress indicator and a visible order summary.
On WooCommerce, cart fragments, caching plugins and theme conflicts can slow the cart or break it entirely. Our 90-day WooCommerce conversion plan covers those technical checks.
Speed and errors
A slow checkout or a hidden validation error (a postcode field rejecting valid entries, a discount code that silently fails) ends sessions without a trace. Watch session recordings of abandoned carts and look for rage clicks and repeated form errors.
Step 4: Fix trust and policy signals
Australian shoppers are quick to spot a store that feels amateur. Humii CEO Mareile Osthus said in comments reported by Inside Retail that Australians are willing to buy but not to struggle. Clear communication and answered questions remove the friction that makes a site feel unreliable.
Trust checks for your cart and checkout:
- Reviews near the buy button, ideally with photos.
- Returns and delivery policy linked from the cart, in plain language.
- Contact details: a real email, a phone number or live chat, and a business name or ABN in the footer.
- Security cues: recognised payment logos and a clean, branded checkout.
- Policy wording that is legal. The ACCC’s review of online stores found terms and conditions that may breach the Australian Consumer Law, including misleading statements in returns policies. Lines like “no refunds on sale items” are the sort of wording to review. Informed shoppers recognise them, and they can leave a poor impression even before a legal issue arises. If you are unsure about your terms, have them checked by a lawyer who knows Australian consumer law.
Step 5: Check the traffic itself
If your tracking is sound and checkout works, look at who is arriving.
- Broad prospecting audiences produce plenty of curious carts and few buyers. Compare cart-to-purchase rates by campaign.
- Discount-led ads attract people who add to cart and wait for a code.
- Mismatch between ad and landing page: the ad promises one product, price or offer and the page shows another.
- Retargeting gaps: carts that are never followed up are sales left behind.
Creative also shapes intent. Ads that show the product in use and set honest expectations on price and delivery tend to bring buyers rather than browsers. See our notes on ecommerce ad creative best practices and social ad formats for ecommerce.
Step 6: Recover the carts you already have
Fixing the cause reduces future abandonment. Recovery brings back some of today’s. Set up an abandoned cart sequence in your email platform, and SMS if you have consent.
A simple structure:
- Within the first hour or so: a plain reminder with the cart contents and a direct link back.
- Around a day later: answer the likely objection, such as delivery times, returns or reviews.
- A few days later: a final nudge, with an incentive only if your margins allow it.
We walk through each message in our abandoned cart email templates, and our email marketing page covers automation more broadly.
A worked example of reading the funnel
Here is an illustration with made-up numbers, to show the logic rather than a client result. Say a homewares store had 10,000 sessions in a month.
| Stage | Sessions or users | Rate from previous step |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 10,000 | n/a |
| Add to cart | 1,000 | 10% |
| Begin checkout | 300 | 30% |
| Add shipping info | 220 | 73% |
| Add payment info | 90 | 41% |
| Purchase | 80 | 89% |
Add-to-cart is close to the Australian homewares benchmark, so the product pages are fine. The big drops are cart to checkout (30%) and shipping to payment (41%). That points to shipping cost shock and a payment step that is failing or untrusted. The fix list writes itself: show shipping earlier, test every payment method on mobile, add trust cues next to the payment fields. Changing product photos would have been wasted effort.
Perspective: what we see most often
When a brand tells us it has add-to-carts and no sales, we start with the same question: has anyone placed a real order on a phone this week? Surprisingly often, the answer is no, and a payment option, a discount code or a shipping rule has been quietly broken since a theme update.
The second pattern is more strategic. Brands chase a headline conversion rate instead of diagnosing the customer journey. They change five things at once, can’t tell what worked, and the data gets muddier. We prefer one hypothesis at a time, measured against the brand’s own baseline by source and device.
The third is that cart problems are often traffic problems wearing a disguise. Cheap, broad social traffic fills carts with people who were never going to buy. Tightening targeting and creative can lift revenue even when the site hasn’t changed.
This is why our work is hands-on and led by senior strategists, with no outsourcing. The diagnosis needs someone who can read the analytics, the ad account and the checkout together, and then explain it plainly to the owner.
— Liza
When to bring in help
Many owners can run the checks above themselves. Consider outside help when:
- you have solid traffic and spend but the fix is not obvious after a proper audit
- tracking, ads and the store all need to be reviewed together
- you want a structured plan to scale after the leak is fixed
We work with eCommerce brands on exactly this. Our Convert More Customers service looks at the store, funnel and traffic together, and the 12 Week DOUBLE Your Revenue Challenge is a structured, mentored programme for brands that want to scale. If you would rather start with a conversation, you can reach us through the Moor Marketing site. For a self-directed start, our CRO checklist covers many of the checks above.
A four-week action plan
Week 1: Data. Place test orders on mobile and desktop. Verify every GA4 ecommerce event. Reconcile platform orders with analytics and ad platform purchases.
Week 2: Diagnosis. Build the funnel by device and source. Identify the single biggest drop. Watch session recordings around that step.
Week 3: Fix. Change one thing at the biggest drop: shipping visibility, guest checkout, payment methods or policy wording. Launch your abandoned cart emails.
Week 4: Measure. Compare against your 90-day baseline. Keep the change if it helped, revert if not, and pick the next leak.
FAQ
What is a good add-to-cart rate in Australia?
It depends on your category. In 2024, Australian fashion stores averaged about 10.1% and furniture and homewares about 9.9% in EcommerceDB’s data. Use these for orientation only. Your own 90-day baseline by source and device is a better yardstick.
Why are my ads getting clicks and add-to-carts but no purchases?
Start by confirming that purchase tracking works and that a test order completes on a phone. Then look at checkout friction such as late shipping costs and missing payment options. If both are clean, the audience may be too broad or the offer may attract people waiting for a discount.
Why are people not completing checkout?
The common reasons are unexpected costs, forced account creation, limited payment methods, a slow or confusing form, and a lack of trust signals. Use the GA4 checkout journey report to see which step loses the most people before guessing.
Do abandoned cart emails really work?
They recover some of the people who were already interested, which makes them one of the cheaper fixes to run. They do not solve a broken checkout. Send the first message promptly, address a likely objection in the second, and treat discounts as a last resort.
Sources
- EcommerceDB: Australian Fashion benchmark KPIs
- EcommerceDB: Australian Furniture & Homeware benchmark KPIs
- Inside Retail Australia: One in four online shoppers is lost before checkout, Humii report finds
- ACCC: sweep uncovers concerning online shopping return policies and terms and conditions
- Anisimoff Lawyers: ACCC targets misleading surcharges and pricing
- DHL e-commerce trends report 2025
- Google Analytics Help: recommended events
- Google Analytics Help: Checkout journey report
