80% of Shoppers Abandon at Checkout – Here's Why That's Fixable

01 /The Concept

PrettyDamnQuick's core argument is that e-commerce stores are leaving significant revenue on the table because their checkout pages treat every shopper the same – and shoppers are not the same.

Abandoned carts represent roughly $270 billion in lost annual sales across the industry. The question is: why does someone who already chose their products bail before completing the purchase?

First-time buyers need trust signals. Repeat buyers respond to loyalty perks. Local customers want same-day delivery options. International shoppers need upfront clarity on delivery times and costs to their country. Mobile users need a simpler, thumb-friendly checkout. Each of these is a different problem with a different fix – and most stores apply one-size-fits-all checkout pages to all of them.

PrettyDamnQuick lets merchants build distinct checkout experiences for distinct customer segments – no coding required.

Setup starts with defining segments. The platform offers a rich set of segmentation parameters: current order value, lifetime order history, delivery destination, which channel or campaign brought the buyer in, and many more – combinable in any configuration.

Once segments are defined, merchants can A/B test different checkout layouts and offers against each one – rotating old and new pages for a given segment and comparing conversion rates.

When a new page wins, one button push deploys it to all buyers in that segment. Then the next test begins.

The startup claims the platform lifts checkout conversion by 17% on average, while simultaneously growing revenue by 19% through upsell and cross-sell offers embedded in the checkout flow.

It also includes a built-in delivery broker: merchants connect multiple shipping carriers, and the platform automatically surfaces the most cost-effective options for each specific order. The company says this can trim shipping costs by up to 40%.

Post-purchase, the platform generates personalized shipment tracking pages for each customer segment – with additional offers designed to drive a repeat purchase.

The platform is currently Shopify-only. Pricing runs from $750 to $1,350/month depending on feature tier.

PrettyDamnQuick also offers AI-generated checkout page suggestions by segment. For annual subscribers this is included; monthly subscribers pay $1,500; one-off access costs $3,000.

Based on its merchant base, the company expects to process 300 million orders worth $4 billion in 2025. That performance underpinned its latest raise: $25 million, bringing total funding to $38 million.

02 /Why It Matters

Most e-commerce stores pour their optimization energy into landing pages – the first page a visitor sees after clicking an ad or search result. The assumption: if they got this far, the hard part is done.

But that's not how it works. A staggering proportion of shoppers drop off at checkout even after adding items to their cart. Cart abandonment rates run between 73% and 85% depending on device – lower on desktop, higher on mobile.

The implication is clear: checkout page optimization is at least as important as landing page optimization. Even small conversion improvements there translate into meaningful revenue recovery.

And PrettyDamnQuick isn't the only startup to have noticed this.

ThriveCart ([covered here](/review/chem-obidnee-tem-vostrebovannee)), founded back in 2016, built a similar checkout optimization platform, running profitably for years before deciding to take on outside capital in early 2023 – and raising $35 million in its first round.

The conversion problem isn't unique to e-commerce, either. Mobile app developers face the same drop-off at the paywall moment. Helium ([covered here](/review/chto-meshaet-emu-zaplatit)), a startup that entered Y Combinator last year, takes the PrettyDamnQuick approach and applies it to mobile apps: marketers can build and test multiple paywall variants without pushing new app versions to the app stores.

While we're on the subject of non-obvious conversion levers, there's also Bloom ([covered here](/review/44-k-konversii-v-pokupku)), which built a platform that automatically tests different product images with different customer segments – based on what image types each segment actually clicks. The claimed conversion lift: 44%. That's not a rounding error.

And EmbedSocial ([covered here](/review/obychnye-internet-magaziny-uzhe-ustareli)) built a plugin that pulls in real user photos featuring the store's products from around the web and turns them into a shoppable gallery – with buy buttons linked directly to the store. The claimed conversion lift: 10%.

03 /Opportunities

E-commerce is mature enough that it can feel like every problem has been solved. Mostly, yes. Which means we're entering the era of details – and as every engineer knows, the devil lives there.

The opportunity now is in precision optimization: improving the specific mechanics of how stores operate. Even single-digit percentage improvements in conversion or cost can produce large swings in absolute profit for a store at scale – and stores will pay for that.

PrettyDamnQuick is a clear example of this dynamic. The $38 million in investment it has attracted signals that investors see real value here too. That matters.

The direction to watch: platforms that optimize the specific operational details of e-commerce.

A useful thought experiment: think about the last time you nearly bought something online but abandoned at checkout. Experienced e-commerce operators have mapped those abandonment triggers in detail – friction at address entry, surprise shipping costs revealed too late, a payment method not supported. Each friction point is a fixable engineering problem, and each fix is measurable in conversion percentage points. At the scale of even a mid-size e-commerce store, a single percentage point of conversion improvement can translate to hundreds of thousands in recovered annual revenue.

Even if it seems like a small thing – this is precisely the moment when small things have started to matter commercially. And there's money in solving them.