Episode 03 — The $260 Billion Cart Abandonment Problem

HOST A:  Two hundred sixty billion dollars. That’s the number we teased at the end of last episode, and I want to just sit with it for a second before we unpack it.

HOST B:  It’s an enormous figure. Where does it actually come from?

HOST A:  So the underlying data point is that cart abandonment averages around seventy percent across eCommerce. Seven out of ten people who put something in a cart never complete the purchase. And when you translate that abandonment rate into the value of sales that are theoretically recoverable, the report puts that figure at 260 billion dollars a year.

HOST B:  And to be clear, not all cart abandonment is an accessibility issue. People abandon carts for all kinds of reasons — they’re comparison shopping, they got distracted, they were never that serious about buying.

HOST A:  Completely fair. But here’s where it gets interesting, and where this connects directly to what we covered last episode on lawsuits. The survey asked eCommerce leaders directly: why do you think people abandon their carts? And accessibility-adjacent friction is sitting right there in the answers, even when people aren’t using the word “accessibility” to describe it.

HOST B:  Let’s go through the actual breakdown, because I think the numbers are more specific than people might expect.

HOST A:  Sure — thirty-nine percent cited unexpected costs, things like shipping, fees, taxes showing up late in the process. Eighteen percent cited long or complicated checkout flows. Fifteen percent cited site crashes or errors. And fourteen percent said they couldn’t calculate the total cost upfront.

HOST B:  Okay, so walk me through the accessibility connection on those, because on the surface, “unexpected shipping costs” doesn’t sound like an accessibility problem.

HOST A:  It’s not purely an accessibility problem, you’re right. But look at the other three categories — long or complicated checkout flows, site crashes or errors, inability to calculate total cost upfront. Those are exactly the kinds of friction that compound dramatically for someone using assistive technology. A checkout flow that’s merely “a little long and complicated” for an average user can be completely broken for someone using a screen reader, if form fields aren’t labeled, if error messages aren’t announced, if the page isn’t structured so assistive tech can actually parse what’s happening.

HOST B:  So the same friction that costs you a few abandoned carts from frustrated general users probably costs you all of the carts from users with disabilities trying to complete the same task.

HOST A:  That’s exactly the mechanism. And the research backs this up directly — nearly one in four eCommerce leaders surveyed admit that assistive technologies don’t work properly on their checkout pages.

HOST B:  One in four. That’s not a fringe problem.

HOST A:  And here’s the number that I think explains why that one-in-four figure exists in the first place: only forty percent of eCommerce leaders have conducted an accessibility audit in the past year.

HOST B:  So sixty percent haven’t looked. Which means a meaningful chunk of that twenty-five percent with broken checkout pages probably don’t even know it yet.

HOST A:  Right, and that’s the line from the report that I think captures this whole episode: checkout isn’t failing by accident, it’s failing because too few brands are testing it.

HOST B:  Let’s get specific about what “checkout fails” actually looks like in practice, the same way we did with lawsuits last episode, because I think it makes the abstraction concrete.

HOST A:  When checkout forms lack labels — so a screen reader announces “edit text” instead of “card number” or “shipping address” — a user can’t reliably tell what information goes where. When errors aren’t announced — say someone mistypes their zip code and the form just silently highlights the field red — a sighted user notices the visual cue immediately, but someone using a screen reader has no idea anything went wrong. They just keep hitting submit, confused about why nothing’s happening.

HOST B:  That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that ends in someone closing the tab.

HOST A:  Without complaining. Without filing a support ticket. Without leaving a one-star review. They just leave, and on your end it shows up as a completely unexplained abandoned cart in your analytics dashboard.

HOST B:  Which is the core point here, isn’t it — that accessibility failures and cart abandonment are genuinely two sides of the same coin. They’re not two separate metrics you happen to be tracking. A meaningful share of your abandonment number is your accessibility number, you just haven’t labeled it that way.

HOST A:  That’s precisely how the report frames it. And I think it’s a really useful reframe for anyone whose job is specifically conversion rate optimization, because it means accessibility auditing should probably sit inside your CRO process, not off in a separate compliance silo somewhere.

HOST B:  Let’s also flag the keyboard navigation piece, because we mentioned it but didn’t go deep. Payment modals that can’t be navigated by keyboard — what does that actually look like for a shopper?

HOST A:  So picture someone who, because of a motor impairment, navigates entirely by keyboard — tab, shift-tab, enter — no mouse at all. If a payment modal pops up and the focus doesn’t move into it properly, or there’s no way to tab through the card number, expiry, and CVV fields in a logical order, or the “submit payment” button simply can’t be reached by tabbing — that person is stuck. Not slowed down. Stuck. There’s no workaround. They cannot complete the purchase.

HOST B:  And that’s at the absolute final step of the funnel — the moment you’ve already spent money to acquire that customer, gotten them to add something to their cart, and gotten them all the way to typing in their payment details.

HOST A:  Which is what makes this such an expensive place for a barrier to live. It’s the worst possible point in the entire customer journey to lose someone.

HOST B:  Let’s talk solutions, because I don’t want this episode to be purely diagnostic. What does “fixing this” actually look like?

HOST A:  The report frames it well: accessible checkout doesn’t just prevent lawsuits, it directly reduces friction in the checkout process, which allows online sellers to recover lost revenue at the most decisive point in the funnel. So practically — proper labeling on every form field, so assistive technology can correctly identify what each one is. Errors that are announced programmatically, not just shown visually, so a screen reader user knows immediately when something needs to be corrected. Full keyboard operability through the entire checkout flow, including any modals, with no dead ends. And testing — actual testing, with real assistive technology, not just an automated scanner — because automated tools catch a meaningful chunk of issues but not everything.

HOST B:  And that connects right back to the forty percent audit statistic from earlier. If sixty percent of companies haven’t audited in the past year, step one for most listeners is genuinely just: go look.

HOST A:  That’s the unglamorous truth of it. A huge amount of this 260 billion dollar opportunity isn’t locked behind some incredibly hard technical problem. It’s locked behind the fact that most companies have simply never checked.

HOST B:  Let’s close with the reframe I think matters most here. We’ve now covered two episodes — lawsuits and cart abandonment — that both sound like cost and risk topics on the surface.

HOST A:  Right, and I think that’s deliberate in how the season is built, because most people’s first association with accessibility is exactly that: cost, risk, compliance, downside protection. But cart abandonment flips that framing a little. Fixing accessibility issues in checkout isn’t purely defensive. It’s direct revenue recovery. You’re not just avoiding a lawsuit — you’re capturing sales that are currently walking out the door, from people who already wanted to buy from you and simply couldn’t complete the transaction.

HOST B:  Which sets up the next episode nicely, because voice commerce takes that same idea — accessibility as upside, not just downside — and shows it in its most extreme form.

HOST A:  Exactly. Next time we’re talking about how a feature that started purely as an accessibility tool, built for people who couldn’t easily type or read a screen, turned into an eighty-one-billion-dollar mainstream shopping channel that nearly half of U.S. consumers now use.

HOST B:  That’s a great pivot point. See you there.

HOST A:  Thanks for listening.