The average cart abandonment rate is 70.19% in 2025, meaning that seven out of ten carts are abandoned before the transaction is completed.
You’re looking at your ecommerce dashboard and notice something concerning: out of every 10 customers who reach the cart, only 3 complete the purchase. The other 7 disappear without a trace.
This is not unusual. It’s the norm. The average cart abandonment rate is 70.19% in 2025, meaning that seven out of ten carts are abandoned before the transaction is completed. In Latin America, the figure is even worse: 75% abandonment, slightly above the global average.
What’s more important to understand is where and why this abandonment happens. And the answer is clear: half of all abandonments occur specifically during checkout, at the exact moment when the customer must choose how to pay. This is the most critical phase of your sales funnel—and where your business is losing money massively.
The good news: most of these abandonments are not inevitable. They are caused by avoidable friction in the payment process—friction you can eliminate by carefully designing your payment options.
Before diving into how to fix it, you need to understand the scale of the financial problem.
Globally, businesses lose approximately $2.96 trillion annually in potential merchandise due to cart abandonment. Of this total, an estimated $192.4 billion is actually recoverable through smart checkout optimization and recovery strategies.
In other words: there is nearly $200 billion being left on the table simply because businesses do not properly optimize their checkouts.
To put this into context for your business: if you generate $1 million in annual sales, cart abandonment represents approximately $2.3 million in order value that you never completed. Of that amount, around $1.6 million could be recovered through checkout optimizations.
Even small improvements matter. A 5 percentage point increase in your conversion rate (for example, reducing abandonment from 75% to 70%) translates into tens of thousands of dollars in additional annual revenue.
Many abandonments happen because the customer sees the price in USD and doesn’t know how much their bank will actually charge them. By using OneKey to display prices in local currency (BRL/MXN) with a guaranteed exchange rate, you eliminate that uncertainty.
Payment options are not a minor factor—they are the factor. The numbers speak clearly:
That’s a 13 percentage point difference. For a business generating $1 million in annual sales, that represents approximately $180,000 in additional revenue directly attributable to offering multiple payment options.
Additionally, 24% of customers lose trust and loyalty when they cannot use their preferred payment method. This is an alarming statistic suggesting that customers not only abandon the transaction—they may abandon the brand entirely.
If your business operates only in Europe or North America, you might get away with international credit cards + Apple Pay + Google Pay. But in Latin America, reality is different.
Each country has its own preferred payment systems, and customers expect them to be available:
If you run an online store in Brazil but only accept international cards, you are effectively telling your customers: “Your local payment method is not welcome here.” Most will respond by abandoning the cart.
The frustration is even greater when you consider that Pix in Brazil has reached a point where 76% of consumers consider it their main payment method. If you don’t have Pix, you don’t have access to that 76% of the market. Period.
Data shows a clear correlation:
Each additional option represents a customer who would otherwise have abandoned the cart.
This is where many entrepreneurs get stuck. Technically, they know they need Pix in Brazil, SPEI in Mexico, PSE in Colombia, plus international cards and digital wallets. But each requires a separate integration.
One integration for Pix, another for SPEI, another for card processors, another for Apple Pay, another for Google Pay. Soon you have more than 10 completely separate integrations, each with:
Operational complexity becomes unsustainable. How do you test that Pix works on an iPhone running iOS 17.3? How do you ensure SPEI doesn’t interfere with international card processing? How much time does your team spend maintaining integrations instead of improving your product?
Many entrepreneurs give in to this complexity and end up offering only international credit cards “for simplicity.”
But there is a better way.
Instead of maintaining 10+ separate integrations, you need a unified payment orchestration platform—a single API that connects you to Pix, SPEI, PSE, international cards, digital wallets, BNPL, and more.
With a unified solution:
The result: you can offer all the payment options your customers expect—without operational complexity.
Imagine your current checkout flow:
Before (Fragmented):
“Credit card?”
Nothing else.
Customer thinks: “I don’t have an international card / I don’t trust entering my details here.”
They leave.
After (Unified):
Pix (Brazil) | SPEI (Mexico) | Apple Pay | Google Pay | Credit Card | BNPL
Almost everyone finds an option that feels comfortable.
Result: conversion.
It’s not magic. It’s simply respecting customer preferences.
Suppose your store currently has a 2% conversion rate. That means out of 1,000 visitors, 20 complete a purchase.
With Pix + SPEI + digital wallets + existing methods, you could plausibly increase your conversion rate to 2.5–2.7%.
Now, out of 1,000 visitors, 25–27 purchases are completed instead of 20.
If your average order value (AOV) is $100, that’s $500–700 in additional revenue per 1,000 visitors.
For a site with 100,000 monthly visitors, that’s $50,000–70,000 extra revenue per month. Annually: $600,000–840,000.
The investment to consolidate your payment options into a unified platform? Typically $5,000–15,000 setup plus monthly fees. It pays for itself in the first month.
Payment options are critical—but not the only factor. A truly optimized checkout also requires:
Price Transparency:
Show all costs (taxes, shipping, fees) before the final step. A surprise $40 shipping fee kills conversions.
Minimal Form Fields:
Only ask for essential information. For digital products, no need for a shipping address.
Guest Checkout:
Allow purchases without account creation. Offer account creation afterward.
Smart Defaults & Autofill:
Use geolocation for country suggestions and browser autofill for name/email.
Real-Time Validation:
Provide instant feedback on errors instead of silent failures.
Mobile-First Design:
With mobile abandonment reaching 75–85%, mobile optimization is mandatory.
For businesses in Latin America, the challenge isn’t just accepting payments—it’s accepting the right methods without adding technical complexity.
OneKey Payments acts as a payment orchestration layer, centralizing multiple methods into a single integration.
A unified API integrating:
Operationally, this eliminates fragmentation:
It also introduces a key checkout optimization: payment tokenization (One-Click Buy).
For recurring purchases:
The impact is direct: friction in recurring payments drops to near zero, improving conversion and speed.
In practice:
This dual approach—local adaptation + friction reduction—is what tackles one of the biggest abandonment points: payment.
If your abandonment rate is around 70–75%, you already know there’s money being left on the table. A lot of money.
The good news: you don’t need to fix everything at once. You can:
70% abandonment is not a law of nature. It’s a symptom of misalignment between what customers want (flexible, local payment options) and what businesses offer (often just one option).
When you align your payment options with customer preferences, simplify checkout, and give customers the ability to pay in the way they trust most, abandonment doesn’t disappear—but it drops significantly.
From 75% down to 65%, or even 60%. Financially, that means tens or hundreds of thousands in additional revenue with a relatively modest investment.
The ecommerce battlefield in 2026 is not defined by who has the best product. It’s defined by who best respects customer preferences at checkout.
For serious businesses looking to grow in Latin America, optimizing payment options is not optional. It’s the highest-leverage action you can take.
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