I want to tell you about the shop I built, broke, and rebuilt, because I think it'll save you some grief.
I build websites and stores for authors, and I sell digital products from my own site. So when I set up my shop, I did what made sense for the timeline: I used an off-the-shelf shopping cart tool instead of building the checkout from scratch. Add a few lines to your pages, connect it to a payment processor, start selling. Faster than doing it myself, and for a lot of stores that's exactly the right call.
Then it started fighting me.
The cart couldn't read my prices correctly. My site was reachable at two slightly different web addresses, and the cart was treating those as two separate stores, which meant correcting it by hand on every page. I worked through those. Then checkout started rejecting orders on a validation rule I could see firing but couldn't get at, because that piece lived on their end, not mine.
That's the part worth paying attention to. I could diagnose the problem. I couldn't reach it.
So I put a “coming soon” page over my own shop, because selling nothing beats sending readers to a checkout that fails. Then I stopped patching and rebuilt the checkout myself, on tools I control.
Took about a week and a half start to finish. The rebuild was more work up front and I'd make the same call again, because now when something breaks I can open it up and go find it.
My Author PA Playbook is live and selling through that setup now.
I'm telling you this because the thing that nearly cost me sales wasn't my product, my pricing, or my marketing. It was a checkout quietly turning people away. And I only caught it because I know what to look for. Most authors don't, so they go looking at their covers and their blurbs instead.
Now, before you close this tab thinking this doesn't apply to you: most authors aren't building their own checkout, and you shouldn't. You're on Shopify or Wix or Squarespace, or WooCommerce if you're on WordPress. Those are good choices. I recommend them to clients regularly. They handle the hard technical parts so you can go write books.
But there's a trade in it, and it's worth naming out loud. You gave up control to get convenience. When something's off with your checkout, you usually can't go in and fix it directly. You get whatever settings the platform decides to show you, and everything else is somebody else's call.
I hit that wall with my own shop and I write code. You'll hit it too, and when you do it won't be because you did anything wrong.
So your job is different from mine, not easier or harder. I have to understand my code. You have to understand your settings. Nearly every fix below is a checkbox somebody already decided for you, sitting in a menu you've probably never opened.
Seven out of ten people don't finish
Here's the number every store owner should know before they start blaming themselves.
About 7 out of every 10 shopping carts get abandoned. Anywhere. Any store. Somebody adds something, then leaves without buying.
That comes from a research group called the Baymard Institute, which studies how people actually behave when they shop online. They averaged 50 separate studies and landed on 70.22%. That number has barely moved in ten years.
So if readers are adding your books to a cart and not buying, that's not a sign something's broken about you. That's the normal state of selling anything online. The useful question isn't how to get that to zero, because you can't. It's which of those seven people were actually going to buy, and what got in their way.
Phones are worse, and it's not close
On phones, about 80% of carts get abandoned. On computers it's about 66%.
That's a big gap. Same books, same prices, same readers. The difference is a small screen and thumbs. (Source)
I want to flag something here, because I went digging on this one. You'll see the claim “70% of romance readers browse on phones” repeated all over author marketing advice. I went looking for where that number came from. There isn't a source. What actually exists is general online shopping data showing most shopping happens on phones, which is a different claim about a much broader group of people than romance readers.
So I won't hand you a made-up number about your specific readers. What I'll say is that most online shopping happens on phones, and phones sell worse than computers everywhere anyone has measured. If your checkout is annoying on a phone, that gap gets wider.
Go pull up your site on your own phone and buy your own book. Not look at it. Actually buy it, all the way through, with your real card. I'd bet money most authors reading this have never done that, and it's the most useful hour you'll spend on your website this year.
Why people actually leave
Baymard asked 4,384 online shoppers why they abandoned a cart. Not guesses. Actual survey answers:
- Extra costs were too high (shipping, taxes, fees): 48%
- Made to create an account: 26%
- Checkout was too long or complicated: 22%
- Didn't trust the site with their card: 18%
- Total cost wasn't shown upfront: 17%
Source. People could pick more than one reason, so it adds up to more than 100%.
That isn't a list of statistics. That's a to-do list.
Almost half of it is surprise costs. Somebody got to the last screen, saw $6.99 shipping on a $14.99 paperback, did the math, and closed the tab. That has nothing to do with your writing.
A quarter of it is making people create an account before they're allowed to give you money. If you have that turned on, go turn it off. That's a quarter of your abandoned carts sitting behind one setting.
And some of it is people not trusting your site enough to type in a card number. If you're an indie author with a store nobody's heard of, that's not readers being difficult. That's readers being sensible. So give them reasons to relax: the little padlock in the browser bar that means your site is secure, recognizable payment logos like Visa and PayPal, a clear refund policy, and a way to contact a real person.
One more thing worth knowing from that same research: about 43% of the people who abandoned said they were just browsing. Those readers were never buying that day no matter what you did. Take them out of the math and you're left with roughly 30% who would have bought if things had gone differently. (Source)
That 30% is your real opportunity. Chasing the other 70% is how you end up with a website covered in desperate popups.
Speed matters, with one honest caveat
Google found that 53% of mobile visits get abandoned if a page takes more than three seconds to load. (Source)
It's real and it's from Google directly. But I'll be honest with you, it's from around 2016 and people still quote it like it dropped last week. Phones and connections have changed since then.
What hasn't changed is the direction of it. Slow costs you people. Whether the number is exactly 53% today, I don't know, and neither does whoever told you it was.
Practically speaking: if your homepage loads a huge cover image, a rotating slideshow, several different fonts, and a chat bubble, all of that has to load before your reader sees anything. You're paying for it in people who leave before your page finishes appearing.
What I'd actually fix, in order
- Show shipping cost before checkout. This is the single biggest documented reason people leave. Every platform has shipping settings. Go find yours and make sure the cost shows up early, on the cart page, not as a surprise on the final screen. Honestly, the cleanest fix for a lot of authors is building shipping into your book price and calling it free shipping, because then there's no surprise at all.
- Let people buy without making an account. This is usually called guest checkout, and it's a setting in every platform. Go check whether yours is turned on right now. A quarter of abandoned carts are sitting behind that one checkbox, and plenty of authors don't know theirs is switched off.
- Stop asking for things you don't need. Every box someone has to fill in is a box they can give up at. If you're selling a digital download, you don't need their mailing address. Go through your own checkout and look at what it's asking for.
- Buy your own book on your phone. Said it already. Saying it again because nobody does it.
- Make your store look trustworthy. Payment logos, a visible refund policy, a contact page that works, and the padlock in the browser bar. Most platforms let you turn payment badges on in your design settings. Boring stuff. It works.
- Turn on abandoned cart emails. These automatically nudge someone who left something in their cart. Most platforms have this built in or offer it as an add-on. Just keep your expectations sane: the email company Klaviyo says these recover around 3% of abandoned carts. If someone promises you 30%, they're selling you something. (Source)
- Spend an hour in your own settings. This is my whole lesson, in the version that applies to you. I had to learn my code because I built it. You have to learn your settings because you didn't. Same responsibility, different shape.
On that last one: click through every checkout and shipping setting your platform gives you. You're not looking for anything in particular. You're just finding out what's there. Most of the fixes above are switches someone set a default on years ago, and you've been living with that choice without knowing it was one.
And if you find something genuinely broken that you can't fix from your settings, that's a fair thing to pay someone to sort out. Being stuck isn't a skill problem. It's the trade you made when you picked a platform, and it was a reasonable trade.
What I'm not going to tell you
I'm not giving you a client case study where sales tripled and revenue jumped 178%. I've read that exact case study in a dozen author marketing posts with the numbers shuffled around. Nobody ever says where they came from. They're made up to sound impressive, and they work on people, which is why they keep showing up.
I'm also not telling you what a “typical author website” should be selling, because author stores are a small, odd corner of online retail that nobody has studied properly. The general numbers lump you in with clothing shops and phone case stores.
If somebody hands you a precise sales figure for romance author websites specifically, ask them where they got it. I'd honestly love to know.
The short version
Seven out of ten carts get abandoned everywhere, so that part isn't you. Phones are noticeably worse than computers. Almost half of it is surprise costs, a quarter is making people sign up before they can pay, and the rest is friction and nerves. About a third of the people who left would have bought if it had been easier.
Fix the costs, fix the checkout, fix the phone experience. Everything else is decoration.
And if your store feels like a locked box you're not allowed to open, that's the deal you made when you picked a platform, and it was a fine deal. But go learn the settings you do have. Most of what's costing you sales is sitting in a menu you've never clicked into.
Every number in this post links to where it came from. That's on purpose. If you're reading marketing advice and the stats don't have sources, there's usually a reason.