Around 70 % of online shopping carts are abandoned before payment, according to the Baymard Institute’s long-running studies. Some of those shoppers were only browsing, but many leave because of the checkout itself: unexpected costs, a forced account, too many fields or a slow page. The good news is that most of these problems can be fixed from the PrestaShop back office.
1. Let customers buy as guests
Forcing account creation is one of the most common reasons to abandon a purchase. In Shop Parameters › Order Settings, enable guest checkout. Customers can still create an account after the order, when they have nothing left to lose.
2. Show shipping costs early
Surprise costs at the last step are the number one cause of abandonment. Make shipping visible on the product page and in the cart, keep carrier names and delivery times clear, and consider a free shipping threshold in Shipping › Preferences: it removes the surprise and often increases the average order value.
3. Ask only for what you need
Every extra field is a reason to stop. In Shop Parameters › Customer Settings you can stop asking for the birth date or the partner offers opt-in, and in Customers › Addresses you can review which address fields are required. Company, VAT number or a second address line rarely need to be mandatory for consumers.
4. Make the form easy on mobile
Most traffic comes from phones. Check that the checkout uses the right keyboard for each field (email, phone, postcode), that browsers can autofill addresses, that error messages appear next to the field as people type and that buttons are large enough to tap.
5. Offer the payment methods people expect
A card form is no longer enough. Express methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal let customers pay without typing their details, and local methods (such as Bizum in Spain or Bancontact in Belgium) build trust. Show the accepted payment logos before the last step.
6. Make the page fast
A slow checkout feels unsafe. In Advanced Parameters › Performance, make sure debug mode is off, caching is enabled and CSS and JavaScript are combined (CCC). Run a recent PHP version with OPcache and remove modules that load scripts on the checkout without a reason.
7. Recover the carts you still lose
Even a perfect checkout loses some customers: they get interrupted, compare prices or wait for payday. A short series of reminder emails brings a meaningful share of them back, and that is where Abandoned Cart Recovery comes in:
- Up to three reminders (by default after 1, 24 and 72 hours) with a Return to my cart button that rebuilds the cart on any device.
- Optional one-off discount created as a real PrestaShop cart rule, single use and removed after it expires.
- Results in the back office: recovery rate, recovered revenue and every followed cart under Orders › Cart reminders.
- GDPR-friendly: one-click unsubscribe, a newsletter-only option and integration with the official GDPR module.
- No server cron required, with an optional cron URL for quieter shops.
Built for PrestaShop 8.2 and 9, with templates in English, Spanish and French, new versions for life and 6 months of support.