Roughly seven in ten online shopping carts never reach a completed purchase. Baymard Institute’s running meta-analysis of 50 studies puts the documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22% as of late 2025, a number that has barely moved in a decade. The reflex among retailers is to chase those shoppers with discounts, countdown clocks, and exit pop-ups. Rokt, the e-commerce technology company built around the checkout window, makes a different argument: many of those tactics make the problem worse, and the more durable fix is to remove friction from checkout and show each shopper only what is relevant. The company laid out that case in a recent post on reducing cart abandonment.
The reasoning starts with how many decisions a checkout asks of a shopper. By the time someone reaches the cart, they have already chosen what to buy. Checkout then piles on more: shipping, payment method, promotions, loyalty sign-ups, and add-ons. Each can carry value, but together they can stall the one decision that matters. The pattern has a name in behavioral research: the paradox of choice, and Rokt points to it to explain why leaner checkouts often convert better.
Why pressure tactics backfire
The tactics retailers reach for to fight abandonment often work against them. Countdown timers that manufacture urgency. Exit-intent popups that block the page when a shopper tries to leave. Scarcity warnings on products that are not actually scarce. Guilt-framed messages that treat hesitation as a mistake. The same discount popup shown again and again in one session. Each can lift conversion briefly. Each also teaches shoppers to associate a brand’s checkout with pressure, which chips away at return visits and trust over time.
Baymard’s data points in the same direction. The most-cited reasons shoppers abandon are practical rather than emotional: unexpected costs surfacing late, forced account creation, and a checkout that asks too much. Pressure fixes none of those. It papers over them. The alternative, Rokt argues, is to design checkout around what genuinely helps a given shopper in the moment, which sometimes means an offer and sometimes means nothing at all.
Where relevance and the payment page come in
Personalizing one checkout by hand is trivial. Rokt’s pitch is that it can apply the same judgment automatically, for every shopper, in real time. The Rokt Brain reads first-party and contextual signals, including cart contents, order value, device, channel, location, and past interactions, to decide the next best action for each customer, up to and including showing no extra offer. Rokt’s network is projected to power 13 billion transactions in 2026, and the Brain analyzes more than 1.95 trillion data points a year, according to the company’s own Rokt by the Numbers. That volume is what lets the system tell a useful offer from a distraction.
The payment page gets particular attention. A lack of preferred payment options is itself a common abandonment trigger, and Rokt Pay+ surfaces payment-related and incentive-based experiences there, from digital wallet and card offers to cashback and gift-with-purchase incentives, without defaulting to a blanket discount. Rokt says the product can unlock up to $400K in incremental profit per one million transactions. Earlier in the flow, Rokt Upcart handles in-cart upsells, which the company credits with up to 25% more revenue per customer. The through line is relevance placed at the point where it helps, rather than pressure applied everywhere.
A bet the market is making
The approach has drawn commercial backing. In October 2025, PayPal began using Rokt to power post-transaction experiences across PayPal and Venmo, and on merchant confirmation pages through Honey. Trade coverage from The Paypers framed it as PayPal turning its owned checkout surfaces into a relevance-driven engagement channel. Fanatics followed with its own selection of Rokt across its sports commerce sites. An industry analysis in The Future of Things described Rokt as leading commerce media’s next phase, pointing to its coverage of the full window from selection to confirmation and its first-party data controls.
Recognition has tracked the momentum. Rokt was cited in the Gartner 2026 Market Guide for Retail and Commerce Media Networks as an example of emerging post-purchase technology, and named an AI Innovator finalist in AdExchanger’s 2026 awards for the Rokt Brain. The engine keeps advancing too: the company’s Brain V4 core separates its machine learning, configuration, and decisioning layers so each can evolve on its own.
For retailers staring at a 70% abandonment rate, the message from Rokt is that the fix is less about pushing harder and more about asking less. Remove the friction, match the moment, and let relevance rather than urgency carry the shopper to purchase.
