Cart Abandonment and Checkout: Why Shoppers Quit and How to Reduce It

Cart abandonment is a topic where it's easy to confuse two very different things: a cart that was never meant to be finished in that session, and a cart a shopper genuinely wanted to buy from — and abandoned partway through checkout. This article separates the two, shows what the Baymard Institute's cart-abandonment rate actually says (and doesn't say), and walks through the specific, measurable reasons shoppers quit during checkout — costs, registration and form length — ending with a checklist and how to measure it in GA4.

How Much Cart Abandonment Really Happens

The Baymard Institute publishes a figure that puts the cart-abandonment rate at 70.22% — an "average calculated based on 50 different studies containing statistics on ecommerce shopping cart abandonment", drawing on studies from MarketingSherpa 2006 (59.80%) to Uptain 2025 (71.72%) (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, "Last updated: September 22, 2025", read 2026-10-01). That's an average across different vendors, different years and different methodologies — not a single, original Baymard measurement. A separate page from the same institute gives a different number for a related but not identical measurement: "70.19%", "tracked ... for 14 years" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability). Cite one of these two pages with its own number — don't average the two together or treat them as the same measurement.

That number doesn't say what it's usually taken to mean. In Baymard's own survey of US shoppers about why they abandon a cart, the answer at the top of the list — ahead of every other reason — isn't abandonment of a transaction in the usual sense: 42% of respondents cited "I was just browsing / not ready to buy" as their reason. In other words, a meaningful share of that 70% isn't lost revenue at all — it's a cart used as a shopping list, a price notebook, or a way to compare options, with no intention of finishing the purchase in that session. The problem that checkout design can actually influence isn't the 70% headline — it's what happens to shoppers who have already started checkout — entered their details, chosen a shipping method — and still don't complete the order. The next section, covering the rest of Baymard's survey, answers exactly that: why do shoppers who didn't say "just browsing" abandon anyway?

Why Shoppers Abandon at Checkout

After filtering out "just browsing", Baymard's survey gives the full list of reasons US online shoppers abandoned a cart:

Source: baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, read 2026-10-01. A caveat that belongs with this table: the page doesn't publish a sample size or a fieldwork date, and the survey covers US online shoppers only — this is not European data.

A national retailer-satisfaction panel will sometimes ask shoppers a related but different question — why they stopped buying from a store, rather than why they abandoned a cart mid-checkout. The two measure different things and shouldn't be combined into one number; treat results from that kind of survey as a separate data point, not a substitute for the checkout-specific reasons above.

Eurostat's isoc_ec_iprb21 series, covering problems reported by people who bought online in the last three months, puts the EU27 average at 35.43% reporting at least one problem in 2025, with 19.92% citing delivery slower than indicated and 11.49% citing a website that was difficult to use or didn't work properly (ec.europa.eu/eurostat, EU27_2020 aggregate, read 2026-10-01). This, too, is a different measurement than Baymard's checkout-abandonment survey — it covers problems people ran into when buying online at all, on any device and in any store, not reasons for quitting mid-checkout — but it's a useful EU-wide sanity check on how often something goes wrong in the first place.

Costs Visible Earlier

The single most common reason for abandonment in the Baymard table is extra costs — 40% of respondents; separately, 12% couldn't see or calculate the full order cost up front. Cost is also something a shop can show a customer before they reach the final step: delivery cost, payment-method surcharges, any tax. The mechanics of delivery cost and the fees charged by specific payment methods and gateways — the actual numbers you'd put in the cart so nothing "appears" on the last screen — are covered separately in our payment methods and payment gateway fees articles; what this section shows is only where that problem sits in checkout, not the fee list itself.

Guest Checkout

Forced account creation is the fourth most common reason for checkout abandonment in the Baymard table — 18% of respondents. The institute doesn't publish what share of stores actually force registration — that question was checked specifically for this article and isn't confirmed in any publicly available Baymard material, so no "X% of stores force an account" figure appears here. The mechanism is clear from the reasons table alone, though: guest checkout removes one of the four most commonly cited reasons for abandonment without changing anything else in the flow. An account can be offered after the purchase completes — at that point the customer has already had a successful buying experience, rather than a barrier placed in front of one.

Shorter Forms: Fields, Autofill, Express Checkout

Checkout length is a separate parameter Baymard measures — and here, too, two pages from the same institute report different numbers on different bases. The cart-abandonment statistics page says "an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12-14 form elements (7-8 if only counting the form fields)", and "the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements ... (14.88 if only counting the form fields)" (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate). A separate blog post from 26 June 2024 gives a different, more recent figure: "the average checkout flow in 2024 is 5.1 steps long and contains 11.3 form fields" — down from 11.8 in 2021 and 12.7 in 2019 (baymard.com/blog/checkout-flow-average-form-fields). These two numbers (14.88 and 11.3) aren't the same measurement on the same basis — cite one page with its own figure, don't average them.

Browser address and contact autofill doesn't need any integration work on the shop's side at all — correctly labelled form fields are enough for the customer's browser to recognise and fill them in automatically. It's one of the simplest changes that shortens checkout without removing a single field.

Express checkout goes further than autofill — it skips the address form entirely. Stripe describes its Express Checkout Element as "integration for accepting payments through one-click payment method buttons", covering Link, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna and Amazon Pay (docs.stripe.com/elements/express-checkout-element); on the address side, setting shippingAddressRequired: true and passing a list of shipping rates has the wallet supply the shipping address instead of a typed form (docs.stripe.com/elements/express-checkout-element/accept-a-payment). Shopify works similarly through its accelerated checkout buttons: "when a customer clicks an unbranded button, they skip the cart and go to the Shopify Checkout", and Shop Pay "saves your customers' email address, payment method, and shipping and billing information, eliminating the need for them to enter these details every time" (help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/dynamic-checkout, help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shop-pay).

Two EU rules are worth knowing at this stage. Under the regulatory technical standards for strong customer authentication (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389, Art. 16), a payment service provider may skip strong customer authentication for a remote electronic payment of up to €30, provided the payer's cumulative spend since the last authentication stays within €100 or no more than five such payments have been made in a row. The exemption is the payment provider's option, not a switch the shop controls (the separate €50 limit in Art. 11 covers contactless payments at the point of sale, not online). And under PSD2 (Directive (EU) 2015/2366), Art. 62(4), a merchant may not charge a fee for using payment instruments whose interchange fees are regulated under Regulation (EU) 2015/751 — in practice, consumer debit and credit cards — or for SEPA credit transfers and direct debits covered by Regulation (EU) No 260/2012. Neither rule removes a form field, but the first can spare a shopper an extra authentication step on small orders, and the second means one classic last-screen surprise — a card fee — shouldn't appear on those methods at all.

Checkout Benchmark: 65% / 35% / 2%

Baymard assessed the checkout flow of 343 top-grossing US and EU e-commerce sites and reports the distribution: "65% of sites have a performance of 'mediocre' or worse, 35% of sites feature a 'decent' or better checkout flow, and only 2% are 'good'" — none of the sites assessed reached "perfect" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability, read 2026-10-01). This is the institute's own classification against more than 110 guidelines and over 30,000 scored checkout elements — not an independent market audit, but a reference point: "the average site has 32 unique improvements to perform in their checkout flow".

Cart Abandonment Reminders

The mechanism is straightforward: a shop records that a customer added products to a cart and left the site without completing the order, then sends a reminder — by email or SMS — listing the products left behind. The technical precondition is knowing the customer's email address before they leave the site (from a contact form or a logged-in account, for example); without that, there's nowhere for the reminder to go.

The legal precondition is easy to overlook. Under the EU's ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC), Article 13(1), electronic mail may be used for direct marketing only with the recipient's prior consent — and the Directive defines "electronic mail" broadly enough to cover SMS as well (Art. 2(h)). Article 13(2) adds a narrow exception: a business that obtained a customer's email address "in the context of the sale of a product or a service" may use it to market its own similar products or services, provided the customer was clearly given a free and easy way to object when the address was collected and in every message since. A reminder that promotes the products left in the cart looks like direct marketing; whether a cart that was never paid for counts as "the context of the sale" is a legal judgement call, and transposition and enforcement of the Directive vary by EU member state. Treat prior consent as the safe default, and check with a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction before switching on an automated cart-reminder flow.

Measuring: The Checkout Funnel in GA4

Google Analytics 4 defines a standard set of ecommerce events that together describe the path from cart to purchase: add_to_cart, view_cart, begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase (developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/reference/events, read 2026-10-01). The documentation describes the three middle checkout events unambiguously: "begin_checkout — This event signifies that a user has begun a checkout", "add_shipping_info — This event signifies a user has submitted their shipping information in an ecommerce checkout process", "add_payment_info — This event signifies a user has submitted their payment information in an ecommerce checkout process" (same page). The GA4 ecommerce guide presents these events as a sequence to implement step by step: "Measure the first step in a checkout process by sending a begin_checkout event", then when the customer moves to the next step, "send an add_shipping_info event", and further, "Send the add_payment_info event when a user submits their payment information" (developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/ecommerce, read 2026-10-01).

To see exactly which of these steps shoppers actually abandon at, GA4 has a built-in funnel exploration report: in Explorations, choose the funnel exploration template and define each step as an event — for example begin_checkout → add_shipping_info → add_payment_info → purchase — and GA4 shows what share of users move from one step to the next, and what share drop off at each (support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974, read 2026-10-01). One technical limit worth knowing upfront: funnel steps are defined by event-and-dimension conditions (for example, a purchase event with a value parameter), not by metrics — the documentation states: "You can't define funnel steps based on metrics".

Checkout Checklist

Pulling the above into one list to run against your own checkout:

• Delivery cost and every extra fee are visible in the cart, before the customer reaches the final payment step.
• Guest checkout is available — account registration is an option, not a requirement.
• The checkout form collects only the data needed to fulfil the order, and fields have correctly labelled attributes so the browser can autofill them.
• If your payment provider offers a faster path (a digital wallet, a redirect-free payment method), it's visible at the start of checkout, not only on the last screen.
• Cart-abandonment reminders have a legal basis checked with a lawyer (ePrivacy Directive Art. 13: prior consent, or the narrow existing-customer exception with an opt-out) — the safe default is the customer's prior consent.
• The checkout funnel is measured, not guessed — you know exactly which step shoppers abandon most often.

If you'd rather work through checkout alongside a full UX checklist for the whole store — not just this one stage — use our UX checklist for your store; this article is part of our wider e-commerce UX section, where checkout is only one of the places a store loses customers.

Sources

Baymard Institute — cart abandonment rate

Baymard Institute — checkout usability

Baymard Institute — average checkout form fields

Stripe — Express Checkout Element

Shopify Help — dynamic checkout buttons

Shopify Help — Shop Pay

Eurostat — isoc_ec_iprb21, problems buying online

ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC, Article 13

Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 — strong customer authentication

PSD2 — Directive (EU) 2015/2366

GA4 — ecommerce events reference

GA4 — funnel exploration reports