The Checkout Nobody Finishes

A client came to me last year with a problem she couldn't understand. Her Squarespace store was getting steady traffic. Products were being added to carts. And then... nothing. Roughly 70% of people who started the checkout process abandoned it before paying.

She assumed the products were the problem. Maybe the prices were wrong. Maybe the descriptions weren't compelling. Maybe people were just browsing. She was about to slash her prices by 20% when I asked her to show me the checkout on her phone.

She pulled up the site on her iPhone, tapped a product, added it to the cart, and hit checkout. The page asked for her email. Then her shipping address. Then her billing address (separately, even though they were the same). Then it asked her to create an account. Then it loaded the shipping options, which took four seconds to appear. Then it asked for payment details. The entire process, on a good connection, took just under three minutes.

Three minutes to buy a £28 scented candle. On a phone. While standing in a queue at Tesco.

We fixed the checkout flow. Abandonment dropped to 40%, which is actually about average for e-commerce. Revenue nearly doubled without changing a single product, price, or description. The site was fine. The checkout was the problem.

The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Is Not Your Enemy

Let's set expectations. The average cart abandonment rate across all e-commerce is approximately 70%. This number hasn't changed significantly in a decade. It will not change significantly in the future. This is because a large portion of cart additions aren't purchase intent. They're bookmarks, price comparisons, wishlisting, and "I'll come back to this later" behaviour.

Your target is not 0% abandonment. Your target is below-average abandonment for your category, which means removing every unnecessary friction point from the path between "I want this" and "I've paid for this."

On Squarespace Commerce specifically, some friction points are within your control and some aren't. Knowing the difference saves you from optimising the wrong things.

What You Can Control

Product page quality. The product page is where buying intent is built or lost. It needs: clear, professional photos from multiple angles (at least three; four to six is better). A concise, benefit-led description (what it does for the buyer, not just what it is). Price displayed prominently with no ambiguity. Shipping information visible without clicking elsewhere. Social proof (reviews, testimonials, or "bestseller" indicators) if available. A clear, visible "Add to Cart" button that doesn't require scrolling on mobile.

Every piece of information a buyer needs to make a confident purchase decision should be on the product page. If they have to navigate to a separate FAQ or shipping policy page to answer their question, many won't bother. They'll either assume the worst or leave.

Shipping transparency. "Unexpected shipping costs" is consistently the top reason for cart abandonment in surveys. The solution is simple: show shipping costs as early as possible. Squarespace lets you display shipping information on product pages using custom code or by including it in the product description. Even a line like "Free UK delivery on orders over £50 / £3.95 standard delivery" removes the surprise that causes people to bail at checkout.

If you can offer free shipping (even with a minimum order threshold), do. The conversion uplift from free shipping almost always outweighs the margin hit, particularly for items under £50 where a £4.95 shipping charge represents a psychologically significant percentage of the order.

Product photography. I said this in the Apple article and I'll say it again here because it's doubly true for e-commerce: photography is the difference between "I want this" and "I'm not sure about this." Online shoppers can't touch, hold, or try your client's product. The photos are all they have.

For physical products, the minimum is: a clean, well-lit main image on a white or neutral background, a lifestyle image showing the product in use or in context, a detail/close-up image showing quality or texture, and a scale image showing the product's size relative to something recognisable. For digital products, show mockups, screenshots, or previews that make the abstract tangible.

Product page layout. On mobile (which is where the majority of e-commerce browsing happens), the product page should follow this order: main image (swipeable gallery), product name and price, "Add to Cart" button, then description and additional details below. The add-to-cart button should be visible without scrolling on most phone screens. If the buyer has to scroll past a 200-word description to find the button, you've lost a percentage of them.

Squarespace's default product page layout is reasonable but not optimised for conversion. Custom CSS can help: tightening the spacing between the image and the buy button, increasing the button size, and ensuring the price is visually prominent rather than buried.

What Squarespace Controls (And Your Limited Options)

The checkout flow itself. Squarespace's checkout is a platform-managed experience. You can't redesign it, reorder the fields, remove steps, or fundamentally change how it works. The checkout page uses Squarespace's own styling, which may not perfectly match your site's design. You have limited CSS control over the checkout page.

What you can influence: whether account creation is required (turn it off; guest checkout should always be available), whether express checkout options are enabled (Apple Pay, PayPal, Afterpay; enable every option your client's plan supports, because each one reduces friction for a segment of buyers), and the post-purchase confirmation page (which can be customised with a redirect).

Express checkout buttons. This is the single highest-impact conversion change available on Squarespace Commerce. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal express checkout allow buyers to complete a purchase in two taps, bypassing the entire address-and-payment-entry process. For mobile shoppers, this reduces the checkout time from minutes to seconds.

Enable these. All of them. If a buyer has Apple Pay configured on their phone, the friction between "I want this" and "I've bought this" essentially disappears. The conversion impact of express checkout is substantial, particularly for lower-priced items where the checkout effort is disproportionate to the purchase value.

Abandoned cart recovery. Squarespace Commerce (Advanced plan) includes abandoned cart recovery emails, automatically sent to shoppers who added items to their cart, entered their email, and left without completing the purchase. These emails typically recover between 5% and 15% of abandoned carts.

Customise the recovery email. The default is functional but generic. A branded email with the specific product image, a personal tone ("Still thinking about the [product name]?"), and ideally a small incentive (free shipping, 10% off) will outperform the default template.

The Product Ecosystem

Individual product page optimisation matters, but the overall product experience matters more. This includes:

Navigation and discovery. Can shoppers find products easily? Category filtering, clear collection pages, and a search function that works are baseline requirements. On Squarespace, product categories map to collections, and the navigation structure should make browsing intuitive. If the client has more than twenty products, the shop page needs filtering or categorisation rather than a single long grid.

Cross-selling and upselling. "Customers also bought" and "You might also like" recommendations are proven revenue drivers. Squarespace doesn't offer automated product recommendations, but you can manually curate related products using a product block below each product's description. This requires maintenance as the catalogue changes, but the conversion impact justifies the effort.

Trust signals. New visitors to a small e-commerce site are making a trust decision: "Is this a real business? Will I actually receive what I'm paying for?" Trust signals that help: a visible returns/refund policy, secure payment badges (Squarespace handles the actual security, but visual reassurance matters), customer reviews, a physical address or business registration number, and professional photography (back to this again, because nothing says "amateur" like iPhone photos of products on a bedsheet).

Measuring What Matters

Squarespace Commerce analytics provide basic e-commerce data: revenue, orders, conversion rate, top products. For deeper insight, connect Google Analytics 4 via the Code Injection panel. GA4's e-commerce tracking can show you exactly where in the funnel shoppers are dropping off: viewing products but not adding to cart (product page problem), adding to cart but not initiating checkout (pricing or shipping surprise), or starting checkout but not completing it (checkout friction).

Each of these drop-off points requires a different fix. Product page drop-off suggests the photography, description, or pricing isn't compelling. Add-to-cart drop-off suggests unexpected costs or a lack of urgency. Checkout drop-off suggests the process itself is too long or complicated.

The candle client's problem was entirely at that last stage. The products were compelling enough to add to cart. The prices were right. The checkout process was just too much work for a phone purchase. Fixing the friction at that single point doubled her revenue.

That's the lesson. You don't need more traffic. You don't need better products. You don't need lower prices. You need fewer obstacles between wanting and buying.