How to improve your checkout and reduce cart abandonment

What happens between cart and order

The checkout is the series of steps from the cart to the order confirmation, often called the checkout funnel. Each step asks for something: an address, a delivery choice, a payment. Each ask gives the shopper a reason to stop.

Baymard Institute, which studies online shopping usability, reports an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 studies, on a page last updated in September 2025. That figure includes people who were never going to buy, as 42% of US online shoppers said they were just browsing. So not all of it is recoverable. But Baymard estimates better checkout design could raise conversion by 35.26% for the average large site.

That is an estimate for large sites, not a promise for yours. The useful part is the list of reasons, because it tells you what to fix.

Why shoppers abandon, in order

Baymard’s list of abandonment reasons, from shoppers who left an order, runs as follows. Extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees were too high: 40%. Delivery was too slow: 20%. Distrust of the site with card details: 19%. The site required creating an account: 18%. The checkout was too long or complicated: 17%. The site had errors or crashed: 17%.

The list continues. An unsatisfactory return policy: 13%. The total cost could not be seen up front: 12%. The card was declined: 10%. Not enough payment methods: 9%. Shoppers could give more than one reason, so the figures do not sum to 100%.

Read the list as a to-do list. Most items are within your control: cost clarity, account requirements, form length, reliability, payment choice and policies. Few need a rebuild.

Show the total cost early

Extra costs are the single biggest reason, so deal with them first. Show a delivery estimate and tax on the product page and in the cart, before the shopper enters any details. Baymard’s product page research found 67% of sites do not show an estimated total order cost near the buy section.

If you offer free delivery above a threshold, say so on every page and show how far the cart is from it. If delivery cost depends on the address, let shoppers estimate it from a postcode or country without starting checkout.

Keep the number consistent across the checkout funnel. Google’s Merchant Center specification requires that the price match across the landing page, structured data and checkout. A new fee at the last step is the exact pattern that fills the top of the abandonment list.

Guest checkout and form fields

guest checkout lets a shopper buy without creating an account. Forced accounts cause 18% of abandonments in Baymard’s list. Make guest checkout the default and the most visible choice, and offer account creation after the order, using the details already entered. Baymard found 84% of benchmarked sites do not delay account creation until the confirmation step.

Cut the form. Baymard’s checkout article, published in June 2024, found the average checkout had 11.3 form fields, down from 11.8 in 2021 and 12.7 in 2019, and says most sites need only 8. It also found 17% of users have abandoned a checkout because of its complexity.

Remove fields you do not use. Merge first name and last name only if your system can split them. Baymard found 89% of sites have more than one name field, while 42% of test participants typed their full name into the first-name field at least once. Do not ask for a phone number unless the carrier needs it, and hide the second address line and company name behind a link.

• Ask for the email first, so you can recover carts that are left.
• Use address lookup and browser autofill, with correct field labels.
• Show errors beside the field, in plain words, and keep what the shopper typed.
• Show a progress indicator if there is more than one step.

Payment options and trust

Distrust of the site with card details causes 19% of abandonments, and insufficient payment methods cause 9%, in Baymard’s list. A declined card causes another 10%. Offer the payment methods your customers use in your market: cards, one-tap wallets, and local methods such as bank transfer or buy now, pay later where it suits your products.

Build trust with specifics, not badges. Show the business name, contact details, delivery and returns terms, and a recognised payment provider’s logo at the payment step. Use HTTPS everywhere, and keep the checkout design consistent with the rest of the site so it does not look like a different, unknown page.

Make the return policy easy to find. 13% abandon over an unsatisfactory return policy in Baymard’s list. Link it near the buy button and at the final step in plain words.

Reliability and speed

Errors and crashes cause 17% of abandonments. These are not design problems. Test the full flow on current phones and common browsers every time you change a plugin, theme or payment setting. A broken wallet button on one browser quietly costs orders.

Speed is part of reliability. Google and Deloitte monitored 37 European and American brand sites for 30 days at the end of 2019, across over 30 million sessions. They linked a 0.1 second mobile speed gain to retail conversions rising 8.4%. Keep checkout pages light and remove scripts that delay the pay button.

Set up alerts for payment failures and a spike in declined cards, so a technical fault shows up in hours, not at the end of the month.

How to measure the checkout

Build a funnel report with one row per step: cart view, checkout started, shipping step, payment step, order complete. Track the drop between each, split by device. The largest drop is your first target. See cart abandonment for the formula.

Add the qualitative side. Watch session recordings of abandoned checkouts, read failed-payment logs, and ask recent customers what almost stopped them. Then test one change at a time, and watch revenue per visitor and refund rate as guardrails.

Link the result to the rest of the store. Read store conversion rate and product page results together, so you know where the real leak is.

What is changing

Wallets and saved payment details keep reducing the number of fields a returning shopper must fill. Browsers and platforms offer more autofill and one-tap payment. Keep the fields small and correctly labelled so those tools work.

Baymard’s own numbers show slow progress: the average form field count fell from 12.7 in 2019 to 11.3 in 2024. Many stores still have easy gains. Check your own flow against current research rather than copying a competitor, because one that looks polished can still be forcing an account.