Most ecommerce teams treat cart abandonment as a pricing problem. They test discount codes, adjust shipping thresholds, and run exit-intent popups offering ten percent off. These tactics assume the customer left because the number at the bottom of the screen felt too high. Often, the number was never the issue. The customer left because the process of buying became more demanding than the purchase was worth.
The 2026 South African Customer Experience Report, produced by Rogerwilco, ovatoyou and Julia Ahlfeldt CX Consulting, offers a useful lens for rethinking this.
Consumers were asked what kinds of hurdles make them consider taking their business elsewhere. Alongside familiar culprits like hidden fees and difficult refunds, three findings stand out because they describe friction that shows up specifically during signup and checkout: 45% cited having to repeat information they’d already provided, 37% cited too much paperwork, and 31% cited pressure selling. None of these relate to the price of the product. All three relate to how much effort it takes to complete the transaction.
The cost of repetition
Asking a customer to enter their address twice, or to re-confirm details they already gave during account creation, seems like a minor inconvenience from the inside of a business. From the customer’s side, it reads differently. It signals that the systems behind the storefront don’t talk to each other, and that the burden of connecting them has been handed to the shopper.
Every repeated field is a small tax on attention, and attention is the one resource an online shopper has the least patience to spend. A customer filling in a delivery address for the second time in one checkout flow is not thinking about your product anymore. They’re thinking about whether this is worth the hassle.
This is where the report’s broader argument about value becomes directly useful to ecommerce. Consumers are increasingly calculating worth not just in rands, but in time and effort. Julia Ahlfeldt frames this using a simple example elsewhere in the report: buy a kettle, and the job is boiling water. If it takes three weeks to arrive, or breaks, or doesn’t fit the counter, the job isn’t done, regardless of what the receipt says. The same logic applies before the sale ever completes. If getting through checkout requires more effort than the product is worth, the transaction fails on effort terms long before it fails on price terms.
Paperwork behaves like a wall, not a step
The report’s finding on paperwork points to something ecommerce businesses often underestimate: forms don’t feel neutral to the person filling them in. A checkout flow that asks for information the business doesn’t clearly need, a secondary phone number, a reason for the purchase, an optional field styled to look mandatory, reads as a demand rather than a formality.
Each additional field is a decision point at which the customer can reconsider whether they still want to go through with the purchase. The businesses that reduce checkout to the fewest fields required to fulfil the order aren’t just making the process faster. They’re removing decision points where doubt can creep in.
This connects to a theme that runs through the report more broadly: consumers are becoming risk-averse, treating every transaction as a small exercise in avoiding regret. A long form doesn’t just cost time. It raises the question of why so much information is needed for what should be a simple exchange, and that question is enough to send some customers looking for a competitor with a shorter path to purchase.
Pressure selling undermines the moment it’s meant to rescue
Pressure selling shows up in the data as a joining friction, but in ecommerce it often surfaces at the exact moment a business is trying to prevent abandonment: the upsell prompt before payment, the countdown timer on stock levels, the popup insisting only two items remain.
These tactics are usually deployed to increase conversion, yet the report’s data suggests they can work against that goal. A shopper who is already weighing whether to complete a purchase does not respond well to being pushed. Wonga’s James Williams, commenting elsewhere in the report on the shift toward risk-averse spending, notes that many businesses still prioritise concluding the transaction quickly over building the kind of trust that keeps customers coming back.
Aggressive upsell tactics are a clear example of that instinct in action, optimised for the immediate sale, at the cost of the confidence that would bring the customer back for the next one.
What this means for checkout design
None of this means price is irrelevant to abandonment. It means price is one variable among several, and for a meaningful share of customers, it isn’t even the deciding one. A shopper might be perfectly willing to pay full price and still leave because the checkout asked them to solve a small bureaucratic puzzle before letting them pay.
Reducing abandonment, then, isn’t only a pricing and promotions exercise. It’s an audit of every point in the flow where a customer is asked to do work: entering information more than once, filling in fields that don’t serve the transaction, or fending off a sales tactic when all they wanted was a straightforward way to check out.
The businesses that treat checkout as infrastructure rather than as a final sales pitch tend to see this most clearly. Every field removed, every piece of information the system remembers instead of re-asking, and every sales prompt held back until it’s actually useful, adds up to a purchase that feels like it respected the customer’s time.
In a market where customers are already doing the maths on whether a purchase is worth the effort, that respect is often what tips the scale.