The Ecommerce Leaky Bucket for UK Stores

A homeware shop in Manchester could show a traffic chart and a disappointing Stripe balance. A lamp at £85 was a common basket. London buyers added it, hit a VAT line that had been hidden, and left. Leeds customers failed the card check and came back to an empty basket. A GDPR cookie wall covered the pay button on common phones. Birmingham wholesale enquiries, which should have been a GoCardless account conversation, were forced through the same consumer checkout and abandoned. Bristol and Edinburgh sessions looked healthy in the report and never became parcels. Liverpool was in the delivery dropdown and not in the courier contract, so those orders failed after payment. Glasgow was excluded, which was correct, but the page did not say so until the last step.

Traffic is not the leak

The planning model left 70% of mobile carts and 52% of desktop carts unpaid. More ads would have purchased more of the same abandonment. The VAT on the media invoice was real. The margin was not.

Checkout that loses the payer

• Show VAT-inclusive prices on the product, and say if a trade login sees ex-VAT.
• Bring the shopper back to the same basket after Stripe's card check.
• Use GoCardless for genuine repeat mandates, not as a surprise on a one-off lamp.
• Move the consent banner off the pay button. State the GDPR purpose in one sentence that matches the fields you store.

If the theme cannot do those four things, rebuild the checkout before the next media plan.

Technical faults that waste a buyer

Faceted URLs indexed in bulk, slow category templates, and duplicated titles send a buyer who already knows the product to a filter with no basket. Cleaning that up is maintenance. It is not a promise of a search position. Technical work should show up as more product views that reach a price, with canonicals and a page that works in Manchester on a phone.

Cart email that respects the inbox

For guests who had entered an email for that order, one abandoned-cart note recovered 24% of those carts in the model. It showed the item, the VAT-inclusive total, and one link. It named how long you would keep the address. A second note went only to unopened first notes. No purchased list. No pretence that a courier export is consent.

Figures for a Monday meeting

Use 70%, 52%, and 24% as a model in the Monday meeting, not as a claim about a named shop. Audit the live basket. Fund more London or Leeds traffic only after a test order survives the card check and the VAT on screen matches the receipt.