About 70% of Shopping Carts Are Abandoned Before Checkout — 5 Designs That Remove Friction

You put real work into your product, and traffic is coming in. Yet most people vanish right before checkout. The reason isn't that the product is bad. It's one click too many. Good UX isn't about looking impressive — it's about being invisible.

The core misconception about UI/UX is that it means "making things pretty." In reality, good UX lets users achieve their goal without even noticing the design. The better a product is designed, the less its design stands out. Even if a solo founder can't hire a designer, knowing this principle alone can change conversion rates substantially.

1. About 70% of shopping carts are abandoned before checkout

In e-commerce, the share of people who add items to a cart but never pay averages about 70%.[^1] Most of the cause isn't price but friction — forced account creation, too many input fields, unexpected shipping costs, slow loading.

The cheapest way to raise conversion isn't adding new features. It's removing steps from the checkout path.

Question for your business: How many steps does my checkout (or sign-up) path have? How many of them are truly indispensable?

2. Amazon's 'One-Click' — taking steps down to zero

In the 1990s, Amazon created '1-Click' ordering and even patented it.[^2] It reduced payment to a single click. It looks minor, but it removed every window of hesitation between deciding to buy and actually buying.

Cut one step of friction and conversion goes up. This isn't a matter of aesthetics; it's a matter of arithmetic.

Question for your business: From the moment a customer decides "I'll buy this" to a completed payment, how many times do they have to move a finger?

3. Jakob's Law — users behave the way other sites taught them

UX has something called 'Jakob's Law.' Users spend far more time on all the other products than on yours, so they expect your product to work the way they already know.[^3]

An original interface is often a barrier rather than a kindness. It's better to put the cart icon at the top right and the login where people expect it.

How to apply it: Before inventing a new pattern, follow the standard patterns users already know.

4. Good design eliminates 'guessing'

Don Norman explained this with a door. A door that leaves you unsure whether to push or pull is a design failure. A good door tells you what to do through the shape of its handle alone.[^4] Products are the same — buttons should look pressable, and the screen itself should say what the next action is.

Question for your business: Where on my screen do users pause and think, "How am I supposed to do this?"

5. Toss — a Korean case of winning by reducing friction

Toss (a Korean fintech app) shook up the market by compressing a once-complicated money transfer process into a few steps. While existing bank apps piled on steps citing security and regulation, Toss focused on one thing: "send money in the fewest steps possible." It didn't win by having more features, but by making people go through less.

Question for your business: Of the steps my competitors take for granted, which ones could I remove?

One sentence that ties all five together

Good UX isn't about adding; it's about subtracting. It's the work of removing friction, one step at a time, between the user and their goal.

• About 70% cart abandonment = the cost of friction
• Amazon One-Click = removing steps
• Jakob's Law = following familiarity
• Norman's door = eliminating guesswork
• Toss = won by making people go through less

For a solo founder, this is something you can do without a designer. Because it isn't about making things pretty — it's about counting steps and reducing them.

If you do just one thing today

Open your sign-up (or checkout) screen and count every button and input field the user has to deal with. Then try removing just one. That one change can shift your conversion rate.

Join the waitlist for the next cohort → We'll find and reduce the friction points on your screens together.

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Sources (✅ verified, WebSearch 2026-06-01)

[^1]: Average cart abandonment rate of about 70.22% (aggregated from 49 studies; stable at ~70% since 2010). Better checkout design could raise conversion for the average large e-commerce site by +35%. — Baymard Institute. https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate [^2]: Amazon 1-Click patent US5960411, granted 1999-09-28 (inventors Hartman, Bezos, et al.), filed 1997. Amazon sued Barnes & Noble one month after it was granted. — USPTO/Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en [^3]: Jakob's Law — "Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect your site to work the same way as the sites they already know." (Jakob Nielsen, NN/g / Laws of UX). https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/ [^4]: Affordances and signifiers ("Norman doors") — Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things.

This article is STAR-T's flagship piece for the UI/UX sector. Figures and concepts have been verified against authoritative sources.

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