Why do people abandon checkout when the item is already sitting in their cart? Rarely price. More often a late surprise, a forced step, or a form that drags on longer than it should. A minute ago this buyer was ready to pay. Something on the last few screens changed their mind, and you can usually see exactly what it was without touching the product or the price at all.
The scale of it is well documented. Across dozens of studies, the average cart abandonment rate sits around seventy percent. Ask shoppers why and the same reasons surface: close to forty percent point to extra costs that showed up too late (shipping, tax, fees), about one in five leave because the site made them create an account before it would even show a total, and a similar share quit because checkout felt long or fiddly. Price is rarely the complaint. Timing and effort are.
Picture it. Someone fills in an address, picks a shipping option, and the total jumps higher than they expected. That jump, not the new number itself, is what sends a thumb to the back button. Or the other common break: a login wall wedged between adding something to the cart and seeing what it will cost, asking for a password before the site will even quote a price. Neither looks broken in a screenshot. Both fall apart the moment an actual person, in a hurry, on a phone, tries to get through them.
None of the fixes are exotic. Show the full cost, shipping and tax included, in the cart before checkout even starts, so the final screen just confirms a number the shopper already saw instead of springing a new one on them. Make guest checkout the default, not a link buried under a signup form. Offer the account afterward, once the order is placed, when asking costs the business nothing. Cut every field that isn't load bearing and let the browser's autofill do the rest. Decisions about order and defaults. Not a redesign.
Here's the catch: the cart total, the shipping rule, and the payment form are rarely owned by the same part of the system, so these small changes are easy to describe and surprisingly easy to get wrong in practice. Fixing one without breaking another takes someone who can see all three at once and knows which to touch first. That's the actual job a studio does here, not rearranging a page, but getting the pieces to agree with each other in the order a stressed, half distracted buyer actually experiences them.
So start small. Open your own checkout on a phone, as a stranger would, and count the screens that pass before you know the full cost. More than one, and you already know where the sale is going. Fix that sequence before you touch anything else on the page, then measure what moved.