Show the full delivered price earlier, let people buy without creating an account, and delete half the fields in your checkout. Those three changes account for most of the recoverable abandonment in the published research, and none of them needs a redesign, a new platform or an A/B testing budget. The rest of this post is the evidence for that claim and the order we would do the work in.
The number everyone quotes, and what it hides
The famous figure is 70.22%. Baymard Institute calculates it as an average across 50 separate studies of online shopping cart abandonment, and it has barely moved in a decade. Seven in ten filled carts do not become orders.
Here is the part that gets left out of the LinkedIn posts. In Baymard’s own survey of US online shoppers, 42% said they abandoned a cart because they were just browsing or not ready to buy. That is window shopping, price comparison and saving things for later. You are not going to design your way out of it, and you should not try. The addressable number is what is left once you set that segment aside.
Ten reasons people leave, ranked
Setting the browsers aside, Baymard’s quantitative study gives the following distribution of reasons US shoppers give for walking away. Respondents could pick more than one, so the figures do not sum to 100.
Read that list as a priority order and most teams discover they have been working on the wrong end of it. Money and time dominate. Trust comes next. Aesthetics do not appear at all.
Independent data points the same way. Eurostat’s 2025 survey of EU online shoppers found 63% reported no problem at all with their purchases, while the most common complaint, at 20%, was delivery slower than indicated. Another 12% found the website difficult to use or working unsatisfactorily, and 5% said the final cost was higher than advertised.
Shipping cost is a pricing problem wearing a checkout costume
Extra costs lead the abandonment table at 40%, and the instinctive fix is to make shipping free. That is not always the right answer, and it is certainly not the only one. The complaint is less about the amount than about the surprise.
Three things genuinely help. Put a delivered price, or a usable estimate of it, on the product page rather than three steps into checkout. Say what the threshold for free delivery is and how far away the basket is from it. And if you ship internationally, be explicit about whether duty and import VAT are included, because a courier demanding another €30 on the doorstep is the single fastest way to lose a repeat customer. Our cross-border checklist covers how those charges work and who can collect them.
- Show an estimated delivery cost on the product page, keyed to the visitor’s country.
- Display the free-delivery threshold and the gap to it in the basket.
- State whether import duty and tax are included in the price or collected on delivery.
- Give a delivery date range, not a vague ‘ships in 3-5 days’.
- If a fee is unavoidable, name it before the payment step rather than after it.
Slow delivery sits second at 20% in Baymard’s data and first in Eurostat’s. You cannot always fix the lead time, but you can almost always fix the expectation. A clearly stated ten-day delivery beats an optimistic three-day promise you miss.
Cut the form before you touch the design
This is the highest-value hour you will spend on your store. Baymard’s checkout benchmark measures how many form elements sites actually show. The average US checkout displays 23.48 elements by default, of which 14.88 are input fields. Their usability testing suggests an ideal flow can run on 12 to 14 elements, or 7 to 8 if you count only fields. In their assessment, most checkouts can remove between 20% and 60% of what they currently show.
| Checkout element | Typical default | What the research supports | Why it earns its cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total form elements shown | 23.48 on the average US checkout | 12-14 is achievable | Every extra element is another chance to stall or mistype |
| Input fields | 14.88 on average | 7-8 in an ideal flow | Address autocomplete removes three or four on its own |
| Company name | Shown by default on many stores | Hide behind a link | Irrelevant to most consumer orders |
| Second address line | Shown and often required | Optional, collapsed | Causes hesitation when it is not needed |
| Phone number | Required | Optional with a reason given | Ask only if the courier genuinely needs it |
| Account creation | Required before payment | Offer after the order is placed | 18% of shoppers abandon over forced sign-up |
Baymard’s wider benchmark of 60 leading stores found an average of 39 potential checkout improvements per site, drawn from roughly 140 documented causes of checkout usability problems. The implication is comfortable and uncomfortable at once: there is almost certainly money on the table, and nobody gets this right by accident.
Speed: the three numbers Google actually measures
Website errors and crashes tie for fifth at 17%, which is as close as the abandonment data gets to a performance measure. Treat speed as a floor you have to clear rather than a lever you keep pulling. Google publishes three field metrics and the thresholds for a good experience: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, each assessed at the 75th percentile of real visits.
The 75th percentile is the important detail. It means your slowest quarter of visitors decides your score, which is usually mobile users on an ordinary connection rather than whoever is testing from the office. Check the field data for your product and checkout templates specifically. A fast home page tells you nothing about the page where the money changes hands.
Nobody abandons a cart because a site loaded in 1.4 seconds instead of 1.1. They abandon because the postage appeared at step four.
The account you keep demanding
Forced account creation sits at 18%. The usual defence is that accounts improve retention. They do, for the customers who make one. They do nothing for the shopper who closed the tab at the registration screen.
The pattern that works is guest checkout first, then an offer to set a password on the confirmation page, once the order is already captured and the value of an account is obvious. You keep the order, the email address and the chance at a relationship. Skip the social-login buttons if you only have a handful; an extra choice at the payment step costs more attention than it saves typing.
Returns policy sits at 13% in the same list, and it is worth taking seriously because the scale is real: the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns estimated in October 2025 that 19.3% of online sales would be returned that year, against 15.8% across all retail. A plain-English returns policy linked from the basket is not generosity, it is conversion work.
Distrust of the site with card details is third at 19%, and that one is a design and proof problem rather than a form problem. We have written separately about what actually makes a store look trustworthy, including which signals shoppers notice and which badges they ignore.
A four-week plan that needs no redesign
Here is the sequence we use, assuming one person working a few hours a week. It is deliberately boring and it does not require a platform change.
- Week one: instrument it. Find out where people actually drop out. Funnel steps from basket to confirmation, split by device. Without this you are guessing, and mobile usually behaves very differently from desktop.
- Week two: price transparency. Delivery estimates on product pages, free-delivery threshold in the basket, duty and tax position stated plainly, returns policy linked from the basket rather than buried in the footer.
- Week three: shorten the form. Turn on guest checkout. Hide company name and second address line behind links. Make the phone number optional. Add address autocomplete. Count your form elements before and after and aim for the low teens.
- Week four: errors and speed. Fix validation that clears the card fields on an error, which is a known recovery killer. Check your product and checkout templates against the Core Web Vitals thresholds on real-user data, not a lab test.
Only after that is it worth asking whether the platform is holding you back. If you are still stuck, our platform comparison sets out what each option actually costs. And if you would rather someone else did the measuring and the cutting, that is what our eCommerce services are for — delivered remotely, wherever your store is hosted.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good conversion rate for my store?
Less useful a question than it sounds, because the figure moves enormously with category, traffic source and basket size. A more productive benchmark is your own checkout funnel: what share of baskets reach the payment step, and what share of those complete. Fix the biggest gap between two adjacent steps and you will beat any industry average chasing.
Does free shipping always pay for itself?
No. It shifts the cost into your price or your margin, and for heavy or low-margin goods that hurts. What reliably helps is removing the surprise: show a delivered estimate early, state the free-delivery threshold, and never let a charge appear for the first time at the payment step.
Should I add more payment methods?
Only nine percent of Baymard’s respondents cited missing payment methods, so it is rarely the first fix. It becomes important when you sell into markets with a dominant local method. Adding six wallets to a domestic store mostly adds clutter to your payment step.
How long before I see a difference?
Price transparency and guest checkout usually show up within a couple of weeks at ordinary traffic volumes. Form shortening is slower to read because the effect is spread across steps. Give any change a full business cycle before you judge it, and change one thing at a time so you know what worked.
Do I need A/B testing for this?
Not for the changes in this post. Most small stores do not have the traffic to reach significance on a checkout test within a sensible window. Implement the well-documented fixes first, measure the funnel before and after, and save testing for genuinely uncertain decisions.
Send us your store URL and we will walk your checkout the way a customer would, then tell you the three changes we would make first and roughly what each is worth. Get in touch with Eudora Technology to talk about your project.
