You log into your WooCommerce dashboard, look at the sales report for the month, and everything seems to be going reasonably well. The problem is that this report only shows you part of the reality: the orders that were completed. It doesn't show you the customers who reached the cart, put the product in, and left without paying. These people don't show up anywhere unless you specifically look for them, which is why most small store owners don't realize they're losing sales until someone tells them.
You don't have to be a large store to have this problem. In fact, in small stores it is usually more serious, because there is no one reviewing the purchasing process regularly or comparing what happens between “add to cart” and “confirmed order”.
Why the sales report doesn't warn you
WooCommerce, by default, is designed to tell you what was sold, not what was not sold. You can activate abandoned cart reports with a plugin, but even without that there is a simpler way to see it: go to WooCommerce → Orders and filter by status. You will find orders in “pending payment” or “failed” status that never became a sale. If you haven't looked at that filter in months, it's very likely that you'll be in for a surprise.
The next step, the one that really matters, is to understand why those orders were left half-finished. And that's no use looking at numbers. It is useful to do the purchasing process yourself, from start to finish, as if you were any customer who does not know your website.
The signs of friction that scare away the customer
There are specific points at checkout where people abandon more frequently. They are not theory from a marketing manual, they are things that you can review yourself right now in your store.
Force account creation before purchasing
If your checkout requires a password to register before you can pay, you are adding a step that the customer did not ask for. Many people who shop for the first time at a small store have no interest in creating an account for a one-time order. WooCommerce allows you to activate “guest shopping” in WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts and privacy. Check it out.
Shipping costs that appear late
If the price that the customer sees on the product sheet and in the cart is not the final price because shipping is added in the last step, you have generated an unpleasant surprise just before asking for the card. It is one of the most common and easiest to fix abandonment reasons: show the shipping cost as soon as possible, even if it is an estimate.
Endless forms
Count how many fields you ask the customer to complete the purchase. Name, surname, address, zip code, province, telephone number, company, NIF, comments... Every extra field is a reason to abandon, especially on mobile. Honestly ask yourself which fields you really need to process and ship the order, and remove the rest or mark them as optional.
Few payment methods
If you only offer card and transfer, there are clients who leave because they prefer Bizum, PayPal or another method that you do not have activated. You don't need to have them all, but you do need to know what your audience prefers. Check which payment gateways you have active in WooCommerce → Settings → Payments and ask yourself if they cover what the people who buy from you actually use.
How to check it yourself, without complicated tools
You don't need advanced analytics to get started. You need to make a complete test purchase, from entering the product page to the final payment step, timing how long it takes and noting when you feel like closing the tab. Also do it from your mobile, because there the friction is twice as noticeable: a long form on a large screen is annoying, but on a small screen it can be reason enough to give up.
Repeat the exercise calmly every few months, especially after updating the theme, the WooCommerce plugin or any extension that touches the checkout. Many times the friction is not introduced by the original design of the store, but by an update that changed something without anyone noticing.
When the problem is not just checkout
Sometimes the review of the purchasing process makes it clear that the problem is not an extra field or a missing gateway, but rather that the entire structure of the store needs a review: loading speed, order of steps, confidence conveyed by the payment page. If when you do the test yourself you notice friction but you don't know where to start to correct it, at Nooria we work on just this type of reviews for WooCommerce stores through our e-commerce service.
And if what you need is a specific diagnosis before deciding if something is worth touching, you can also directly ask what is wrong in your checkout through our team specialized in online stores. Sometimes it is enough to correct two or three points of friction so that those orders that are currently “pending payment” can be completed.
Want to apply this in your business? Tell us about your case and we will reply within 24-48 working hours.