Original article
Full case study
A full cart doesn't always mean a customer wants to buy. A customer leaving a cart doesn't always mean they changed their mind, that difference has been on my mind lately.
Think about your shopping habits. You add something to the cart, then you walk away.
Why?
Sometimes it's because you never seriously planned to buy it.
Sometimes you're comparing prices across sites.
Sometimes the cart is a temporary wishlist.
Sometimes… you actually wanted to buy. But the product experience pushed you away.
Maybe a ₹99 delivery fee showed up at the last step.
Maybe the checkout required you to log in.
Maybe your favourite payment method didn’t work.
Maybe the page took forever to load.
The outcome looks the same: Cart → Exit. The reasons behind it can be totally different, that’s where product analytics gets really interesting. If I were trying to fix a drop in checkout conversion, I wouldn’t treat every abandoned cart the same. I’d want to separate: “I didn’t really intend to buy.” from “I intended to buy. Something stopped me.” instead of just looking at cart abandonment rate I’d start looking for signs of intent:
→ How many items were added?
→ Did the user come back to the cart?
→ Did they reach checkout?
→ Did they start payment?
→ Have they bought before?
→ Where exactly did they leave?
Because an abandoned cart is an outcome, not an explanation and that’s the question I care about more: Can we find users who were ready to buy but got stopped by friction, without assuming every exit is a customer?