Roughly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, according to Baymard Institute. Think about what that number actually describes. These are not casual browsers. These are people who picked a product, chose a size, clicked add to cart, and then walked away.
The visitors who get furthest down your funnel are the ones you lose most often. That sounds backwards, but it is exactly what the data shows, and it is where most of your missing revenue sits.
Intent creates friction, not momentum
A visitor skimming your homepage has nothing at stake. They are not reading terms, not checking return policies, not comparing your price against two other tabs. They cost you nothing when they leave because they were never going to buy.
A high-intent visitor is doing real work. They are calculating total cost, assessing risk, and looking for reasons to say no. Every one of those checks is a chance to fail. The deeper someone goes, the more surface area you give them to find a problem.
This is why pricing pages often have the worst drop-off on the whole site. Nobody lands on a pricing page by accident. They arrive ready to decide, and the page either closes the gap or opens it.
The final step is the most fragile
Baymard's research found that 48% of people who abandon checkout do so because of extra costs: shipping, tax, fees they did not expect. Another 24% leave because the site forced them to create an account. A further 18% say the checkout process was too long or complicated.
None of those are product problems. They are trust and effort problems, and they only show up at the end, after the visitor has already decided they want the thing. You spent money getting that person to the cart and then handed them a reason to quit at the exact moment they were ready to pay.
The practical fix is simple and most brands still have not done it. Show total cost early, including shipping. Offer guest checkout. Cut form fields to the minimum. Display your return policy where the payment button is, not three clicks away in the footer. The checkout page leaks money in predictable places, which means it can be patched in predictable ways.
Hesitation is visible, if you are watching
High-intent visitors behave differently before they leave. They slow down. They scroll back up to re-read the price. They open the shipping tab. They sit on one page for 90 seconds doing nothing. They return to the same product for a third time in a week.
Most sites treat all of this as noise. Analytics records the session, reports the exit, and tells you nothing about why. Your reports show you the door, not the reason someone used it, which is why so many optimisation projects end up guessing.
This is the gap Pounce closes. It watches behaviour in real time, reads the signals that separate a browser from a buyer who is wavering, and acts while the visitor is still on the page. Not a blanket popup for everyone. A specific response to a specific hesitation, at the moment it happens.
Why waiting for exit intent is too late
The standard answer to this problem is an exit-intent popup. It fires when the cursor heads for the browser bar, offers 10% off, and hopes for the best.
Two problems with that. First, by the time the mouse moves toward the exit, the decision has usually already been made in the visitor's head. Second, exit-intent barely works on mobile, where most of your traffic lives. There is no cursor to track. Exit intent on its own leaves most of the recovery on the table.
The better approach is earlier. If someone has been on the same product page for two minutes without scrolling, that is hesitation. If someone adds to cart and then navigates back to the FAQ, that is doubt about returns or delivery. Those moments are worth responding to while the visitor is still engaged, with the one piece of information that resolves the specific doubt.
Blanket discounts are the lazy version of this. They cost margin on buyers who would have paid full price anyway. Reassurance costs nothing: free returns, delivery by Thursday, 4,000 reviews at 4.7 stars.
The maths of fixing the bottom of the funnel
Recovering high-intent visitors is the cheapest growth available to you, because the acquisition cost is already paid. At a 2% conversion rate, moving to 2.4% is a 20% revenue increase with zero additional ad spend.
That is a fifth more revenue from the same traffic, the same budget, the same team. Growing sales without raising ad spend almost always starts here, at the last 10 metres of the journey.
Your best visitors are already on the site. The job is noticing when they start to drift, and saying the right thing before they are gone.