Suggest practical items to reduce cart abandonment

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📝 Context

Topics: Ecommerce | Website / App
For: B2C
Research date: February 2026
Universities: Tel Aviv University, George Washington University

You've tried anything you can think of to optimize your conversions and product checkout rates, from using stars instead of numbers for ratings to asking website visitors to register as soon as they start shopping. But you still worry too many shoppers are abandoning their carts before buying.

There’s one thing you probably haven’t thought of: the composition of products in your customers' carts.

Turns out, what’s in the cart has a strong impact on whether customers abandon their carts or complete their purchase.

Here’s what you can do about it.

P.S.: You can learn more tactics to reduce cart abandonment and increase profits for your ecommerce in our Science-based Playbook of Ecommerce Optimization.

📈 Recommendation

When people are browsing your online store, monitor what items they have in their cart and recommend items accordingly.

If customers have a lot of pleasurable or fun items in their cart (e.g. makeup blush in 4 different shades), recommend 1-2 practical items (e.g. brush cleaning liquid, sunscreen, moisturizer) on the product page or when they’re reviewing their shopping cart. 

People will be less likely to abandon their cart and more likely to complete their purchase.

🎓 Findings

• Online shoppers are more likely to abandon carts when they contain items bought for fun or pleasure (e.g. potato chips or decorative candles), compared to practical or necessary items (e.g. detergent or rice).

• As part of a series of 4 experiments and an analysis of over 14 million ecommerce sessions, researchers found that:

  • As the ratio of pleasurable to practical items in an online cart increased, the chances of the cart being abandoned increased by 8.3% to 17.3%.

  • A shopping cart with 3 or 4 pleasurable items was 15% more likely to be abandoned before checkout than a cart with only practical items.

  • People felt 39.5% more guilty when their cart had 4 pleasurable items compared to none.

  • When items were recommended to shoppers, cart abandonment was:

    • 12.9% lower when practical items were recommended vs. when pleasurable items were

    • 12.5% higher if pleasurable items were added vs. when an item that was neither indulgent or practical was added

    • 9.9% to 21.0% lower when practical items were recommended vs. if no recommendation was given. Shoppers also felt 14.2% less guilt about their shopping.

🧠 Why it works

• When we shop online, we often use our cart to save items we’re considering, or to organize what we want, not necessarily just to buy. This means we’re more likely to abandon items in our online cart than we would in the real world.

• Buying items for fun or indulgence can make us feel guilty, leading us to think twice about buying, and making us more likely to abandon our cart.

• As we’re shopping online, we look holistically at the practical and fun items we’re buying before completing the purchase. When we have more items we actually need in the cart, it makes us feel less guilty as the whole cart seems more useful. 

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✋ Limitations

• The study focused mainly on products priced around $10. The effect may vary for higher-priced items or subscriptions.

• Different customers are likely to have different definitions of what they’d consider a practical or an indulgent item in an online store. 

• The research focused on online shopping. It’s unclear how this would work in physical retail outlets.

👀 Real-life example

Anthropologie offers recommendations for other favorites when shoppers are checking out their online cart.

❌ Issue: Anthropologie offers recommendations of similar items and other popular buys, not tailored to items in the cart.

✅ Solution: Anthropologie can reduce cart abandonment by:

• Recommending practical items, or those with utility (e.g. coasters, table mats) on a cart of fun purchases (e.g. champagne flutes)

• Explaining the reason for the recommendations they offered (e.g. “Options to go with your new purchase” or “Our most popular sellers under $25”), to make people more likely to follow the recommendation.

• Including complementary items in product photography that would be used with the glasses, (e.g. like a tumbler, coasters, napkins or mixing utensils) to increase attention given to the glasses, and increase sales.

• Show how often each product has been viewed online or purchased in the last 24 hours to increase purchase intentions.

🔍 Study type

Online experiments and market observation (analysis of over 14 million ecommerce items purchased or abandoned across a large multi-category retailer and a small sports and outdoor gear ecommerce store).

📖 Research

The Effect of Online Cart Composition on Cart Abandonment. Journal of Consumer Research (February 2026)

🏫 Researchers

• Liat Hadar. Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University.

• Yael Steinhart. Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University.

• Gil Appel. The George Washington School of Business at George Washington University.

• Yaniv Shani. Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University.

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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