Choices, choices: The real problem behind abandoned carts
17 Σεπτεμβρίου 2025 — Stacy Malone
These days, people can find anything they need or want online. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. The truth is, 70% of carts are abandoned, and that’s been a consistent problem for marketers for the past decade.1
Brands have tried many tactics to fix this problem. They’ve reduced checkout friction, nudged shoppers with email reminders, created a sense of urgency, offered discounts and improved shipping options. Yet the number of abandoned carts hasn’t budged.
To better help marketers unlock and capture that lost revenue, we did our homework and discovered that checkout friction may not be the problem—it’s making decisions.
Why curation helps reduce indecision
Over the course of a single day, people make 35,000 decisions—from what to make for dinner to which housewarming gift to buy for a friend.2 And the digital economy plays a huge role in the proliferation of choices. When faced with so many choices, decision paralysis kicks in: Studies have shown that over 7 in 10 Gen Z shoppers say that it's hard to strike the right balance between seeing enough options and getting overwhelmed.3
“Curation is the art of organizing and presenting choices in a way that helps customers decide.”
Before deciding which product to buy, shoppers first need to gain confidence that they’ve found the right one. That’s where curation comes into play. At its core, curation is the art of organizing and presenting choices in a way that helps consumers decide. Here’s how curation works through the entire shopping journey, and gets shoppers to bridge the gap between indecision and confidence:
Curation ensures relevance: When people shop online, relevance is the currency of attention: If customers don’t see something that feels meaningful to them, they move on. Curation matters because it helps to ensure relevance. That’s why two-thirds of shoppers say they prefer personalized product recommendations based on their own preferences.4
Curation helps people discover and refine what they like. Curation helps people narrow their choices and discover the trends or patterns that feel just right for them. At this point of the process, shoppers begin to connect the dots and see how the product fits in their lives. 75% of shoppers say that having the ability to refine their options leads to more confident decisions.5 This step of the curation process is fueled by creativity. It’s especially important for Gen Z, which uses creative personalization to refine and refresh their identities.6
Curation eliminates FOBO (fear of better options): And finally, before customers have the confidence to say “yes,” they need to feel completely satisfied. This is when we see rapid-fire searches, saves and deeper dive engagement, the types of activities that help shoppers zero in on the right products. 60% of shoppers agree that curation keeps them from worrying that there are better options out there.7 That number jumps up to 68% for Gen Z, the group that’s affected by FOBO the most.8
How Pinterest powers confident decisions
At Pinterest we’ve spent years designing a system with curation at its core, fueled by AI but still grounded in human taste. Our AI-powered Taste Graph is trained on billions of real human interactions and preferences, and evolves over time with shoppers as their tastes and preferences change. Through actions like searches and clicks, we’re able to better understand what people like and provide suggestions for products that feel just right. In fact, we’ve found that 90% of Pinterest users say they find products relevant to them,9 and 39% of Gen Z now start their search on Pinterest.10
Confident decision-making isn’t a process that happens instantaneously, which is why Pinterest’s features help shoppers gain clarity and confidence at every stage of their journey. As they start exploring, shoppers might see something they love, but they might not know how to describe it. Our visual search technology uses AI to give people the right words to explore and curate with ease. Meanwhile, boards and collages let people better collect and clarify exactly what they love, while also increasing purchase confidence. And it works: Products saved on Pinterest are twice as likely to be purchased,11 and Pinterest shoppers are 59% more likely to say they’d buy what they discovered on Pinterest versus a leading social platform.12
Act on the insights
From when customers start shopping to when they’ve chosen what they want, it takes just a few steps to influence decisions on Pinterest. Here are five tips to help your brand show up at multiple, relevant stages on their shopping journey:
Upload your product catalog: Automatically turn your catalog into discoverable product Pins by uploading your product catalog. It’s a simple, free way to expand your reach and broaden your search relevance.
Make creative that feels curated: Help shoppers see how your products fit their tastes by using different kinds of lifestyle imagery in your product Pin backgrounds. Featuring a variety of colors and aesthetics is also key to helping your brand show up in more searches. To scale fast, use Pinterest Performance+ creative to resize your images, deliver your content in the optimal ad format, and replace plain white backgrounds with automatically generated ones.
Use Pinterest Performance+ to drive results: Get in front of the right customer at the right time and help boost lower funnel results with Pinterest Performance+ campaigns. Advertisers who used Pinterest Performance+ catalog sales campaigns on average saw a 20% CPA improvement, relative to their “business as usual” campaign setup.13
Create a full-funnel media strategy: Remember that decisions are happening across the entire shopping journey. To help your brand have the power to influence choices at every critical moment—and not after a decision is made—use an always-on, full funnel media strategy. When advertisers increase their presence by running Pinterest ads across the funnel, they have seen 2x higher conversion rates, compared to those who just use one objective.14
Measure for the full journey and beyond: Build a resilient measurement system of truth for the entire consumer journey. Track both short and long-term metrics—even after your campaign ends—to measure lasting business impact.
These tips can help you transform decisions into your superpower. Think of abandoned carts not as an issue to fix, but a moment to support. In a world with millions of choices, shoppers need confidence that they’re making the right decision—and Pinterest is the place for them to curate things they love and gain clarity that your products are right for them.
