The three most common reasons that lead to customers abandoning your site is that the design is poorly manufactured, the site is operating slowly, or that the product is simply too expensive.
Those are all problems they encounter before they even make it to the shopping cart.
So the question is ?why do customers take advantage of the shopping cart and then leave,? Well, the most recent research shows that it has to do with ?compulsory registration.? In fact, a quarter of all customers will hit the shopping cart and then choose to leave because of this form of mandatory registration. In other words, customers leave because they feel pressured or unsafe in some way.
The simple solution to this is just to make the checkout process as painless as possible. Get the bare minimum that is required and let them place their order.