- 70.19% of all online retail orders were abandoned in 2024, according to Baymard Institute — roughly 7 in every 10 carts never reach the payment confirmation screen.
- 48% of shoppers cite unexpected costs (shipping, taxes, fees) as their primary reason for leaving, making transparent pricing the single fastest lever to pull.
- 35.26% is the conversion rate increase Baymard Institute estimates the average large e-commerce site can achieve through checkout design improvements alone — equivalent to $260 billion in recoverable orders industry-wide.
- 62% of sites fail to make guest checkout the most prominent option, creating unnecessary account-creation friction that drives 26% of shoppers away.
- Cart abandonment emails recover between 5% and 11% of otherwise lost sales, and Klaviyo found their customers generated over $60 million from those campaigns in a single three-month period.
Introduction
Your store's traffic numbers look fine. Your product pages convert reasonably well. Yet somewhere between "Add to Cart" and "Order Confirmed," most of your potential customers vanish. Checkout abandonment — the act of a shopper adding items to a cart and then leaving before completing the purchase — is the most expensive leak in any e-commerce funnel, and it happens at a rate most operators underestimate until they see the data.
Cart abandonment is defined as the percentage of initiated shopping sessions that end without a completed transaction. It is calculated by dividing incomplete purchases by total cart initiations, then subtracting from 100. Understanding that number — and the specific friction points driving it — is the first step toward recovering the revenue that is already in your funnel.
The scale of the problem is not abstract. According to Baymard Institute, the potential 35.26% conversion rate improvement from checkout fixes translates to $260 billion in lost orders across the industry. Your slice of that number depends on your current traffic and average order value, but even a modest store doing $500,000 per year in revenue could recover tens of thousands of dollars annually by addressing the issues laid out below.
Why Are So Many Online Shopping Carts Abandoned?
Seven in ten carts never convert — that is the baseline reality every e-commerce operator is working against. According to Baymard Institute, the global average cart abandonment rate currently sits at 70.19%, a figure derived from aggregating 50 separate studies. Mobile compounds the problem: according to Red Stag Fulfillment, mobile devices had an abandonment rate of 80.2% in 2024, compared to 70–73% on desktop. The gap tells you that the same checkout flow performs meaningfully worse on a 6-inch screen than on a laptop keyboard.
Part of the abandonment figure is structural and unavoidable. A share of shoppers use carts as wishlists or price-comparison tools — they were never going to buy on that visit. According to Baymard Institute, 42% of US online shoppers abandoned a cart within the last three months simply because they were browsing or not ready to buy (Baymard Institute, 2025). No checkout redesign recovers those sessions. The opportunity lies in the remaining abandonment — the shoppers who had genuine purchase intent but hit a wall somewhere in the flow.
What Are the Top Reasons for Cart Abandonment?
Unexpected costs are the leading cause of cart abandonment, cited by 48% of shoppers, according to Shopify's enterprise research (Shopify, 2024). Shipping fees, taxes, and handling charges that only appear on the final checkout screen create a mismatch between the price a shopper saw on the product page and the price they are actually asked to pay. That mismatch reads as a bait-and-switch, and shoppers respond by leaving.
Slow delivery is the second most common friction point, affecting 21% of abandoning shoppers. Account creation is the third: 26% of shoppers abandon their carts because they are required to create an account before purchasing. Security concerns push out another 25% of shoppers who leave because they do not feel confident handing over payment details to an unfamiliar site. And 9% leave specifically because their preferred payment method is not available — a fixable gap that costs real transactions every day.
A long or complicated checkout process drives away 21% of shoppers, according to WooCommerce's conversion research (WooCommerce). That number is worth pausing on: roughly one in five abandoning shoppers is not responding to price or shipping — they are responding to friction in the checkout flow itself. That is the category most directly within your control.
How Poor Checkout Usability Impacts Conversion Rates?
Most checkout experiences are mediocre by any measured standard. Baymard Institute found that 65% of sites have a performance of "mediocre" or worse in cart and checkout usability, and only 2% of sites achieve a "good" rating (Baymard Institute). The average site has 32 unique improvements available in its checkout flow — 32 individual friction points that could be addressed before touching a single ad campaign or product page.
The problem is not limited to smaller stores. The top 23 e-commerce sites — all grossing over $1 billion per year — have a 44% worse checkout user experience than they could achieve, according to Geckoboard's analysis of Baymard data. Scale does not automatically produce better UX; in many cases, legacy checkout infrastructure at large retailers is harder to change than a mid-market Shopify store's.
Across the stores we work with at MirandaMedia, the pattern we keep seeing is that checkout friction concentrates in two places: the moment a shipping cost appears for the first time, and the moment a shopper is asked to create a password. Both are solvable without a full platform rebuild.
What is the Potential Conversion Rate Increase from Checkout Improvements?
A 35.26% conversion rate increase is achievable through checkout design improvements alone, according to Baymard Institute's benchmark research (Baymard Institute, 2025). That is not a theoretical ceiling — it is the average improvement available to a large e-commerce site that fixes the usability issues Baymard has documented across hundreds of audits. The industry-wide value of those unrecovered orders is $260 billion, according to Baymard's own calculation.
Smaller, more targeted improvements also compound. Reducing checkout form fields from 12 to 7–8 can increase conversions by 25–35%, according to Growth Engines' checkout optimization analysis. Every field you remove is a decision point you are eliminating for the shopper. The fewer decisions required, the fewer opportunities to abandon.
The math for your store is straightforward. Take your current monthly revenue, divide by your current conversion rate, multiply by 1.35, and you have a rough upper-bound estimate of what a fully optimized checkout could produce. Most operators who run that calculation for the first time find the number uncomfortably large.
How Can You Optimize Your Checkout Process for More Conversions?
Start with form length. The average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements displayed to users by default, according to Baymard Institute — a number that reflects years of incremental additions rather than deliberate design (Baymard Institute, 2025). Audit every field: remove anything that is not required to fulfill the order, auto-fill anything that can be inferred (city and state from postcode, for example), and collapse optional fields behind a toggle.
Guest checkout placement is the second fix. Baymard Institute found that 62% of sites fail to make "Guest Checkout" the most prominent option — meaning the majority of stores are actively steering shoppers toward the account-creation path that 26% of them will abandon. Put the guest option first, make it visually dominant, and move account creation to the post-purchase confirmation screen where it is a low-friction upsell rather than a gate.
Payment method coverage is the third lever. eWallets are the preferred online payment method for 36% of global shoppers, credit cards for 23%, and debit cards for 12%, according to WooCommerce's payment research (WooCommerce). A 2021 Nielsen study commissioned by PayPal found that consumers are 2.8 times more likely to convert on sites where PayPal is visible (Nielsen/PayPal, 2021). Shop Pay can increase checkout conversion by 50% compared to guest checkout on Shopify stores. Adding one express payment option is a 30–60 minute implementation on most platforms — the effort-to-return ratio is difficult to justify skipping.
Transparent cost display is the fourth fix, and it addresses the single largest abandonment driver. Show shipping costs — or a free shipping threshold — on the product page and in the cart, not for the first time at checkout. If your margins allow free shipping above a threshold, surface that threshold prominently in the cart: "Add $12 more for free shipping" is a conversion prompt, not just a notification.
Trust signals at the payment step address the 25% of shoppers who leave over security concerns. SSL indicators, recognized payment logos, and a one-line returns policy placed adjacent to the payment button are low-effort additions. The goal is to reduce the cognitive distance between "I want this" and "I trust this site enough to enter my card number."
What Strategies Can Recover Lost Sales?
Cart abandonment emails are the most direct recovery channel, and the numbers are consistent: companies can typically recover between 5% and 11% of otherwise lost sales by sending cart abandonment emails, according to Geckoboard's KPI analysis. That range is wide because execution quality varies — a single generic email sent 24 hours later performs very differently from a three-email sequence that starts within one hour of abandonment.
Klaviyo's own dataset found that customers generated more than $60 million in sales from cart abandonment email campaigns over a single three-month window (Shopify, 2024). The mechanics that drive those results: a first email within 30–60 minutes while the purchase intent is still active, a subject line that references the specific product rather than a generic "you forgot something," and a clear single call-to-action back to the pre-filled cart.
SMS abandonment sequences perform similarly for stores with mobile-heavy audiences, particularly given that mobile abandonment rates sit above 80%. Push notifications through browser or app channels add a third recovery touchpoint. The sequencing matters more than the channel: reach the shopper fast, with the specific product they left behind, and make returning to the cart require one tap.
Retargeting ads on Meta and Google serve a complementary function for shoppers who do not open email. The audience is already warm — they reached your checkout — and the creative should show the exact product with the friction removed (free shipping callout, trust badge, simplified CTA). Retargeting converts at higher rates than cold prospecting precisely because the consideration work is already done.
Editor's Take — Michal Baloun, Co-founder
The 35.26% conversion rate improvement figure from Baymard is the number I keep coming back to when operators tell me they need more traffic. They do not need more traffic. They need to stop losing seven out of ten shoppers who already found them, already liked a product enough to add it to a cart, and then hit a wall that sent them somewhere else.
The wall is almost always one of three things: a shipping cost that appeared for the first time at checkout, a forced account creation screen, or a payment method that was not available. These are not hard problems. They are neglected problems. The average site has 32 improvements available in its checkout flow — that is not a small punch list, but the first five items on that list will account for the majority of recoverable revenue.
What I tell operators: run a structured walkthrough of your own checkout on a mobile device, on a connection that is not your office WiFi, using a payment method you do not personally prefer. That experience — the one your median customer is having — is usually worse than you think. Count the form fields. Note when you first see the shipping cost. Notice whether guest checkout is the primary or secondary option.
Then fix the three cheapest things first. Show shipping costs earlier. Move guest checkout to the front. Add one express payment option. Those three changes take a day to implement and address the top reasons shoppers leave. The 35.26% ceiling is a benchmark for a fully optimized store — but you do not need to hit the ceiling to materially improve your revenue. A 10% lift on a $1 million store is $100,000. That math does not require perfection.
Here's what advice from Margly looks like
Most analytics dashboards stop at "your number is X". Margly stops at the next sentence — what to do, where, how much it's worth. Recommendations Margly would surface for the patterns described in this article:
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High priority "Surface shipping costs on the product page and cart, not at checkout" — 48% of abandoning shoppers cite unexpected costs as their reason for leaving; eliminating the surprise removes your single largest abandonment driver. Estimated impact: +$3,000 to +$5,500 / month
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High priority "Make guest checkout the first and most prominent option in your checkout flow" — 62% of sites bury guest checkout, and 26% of shoppers abandon specifically because account creation is required; reordering these options is a one-hour fix. Estimated impact: +$2,500 to +$4,000 / month
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Medium priority "Add at least one express payment option (Shop Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay)" — eWallets are the preferred method for 36% of global shoppers, and consumers are 2.8× more likely to convert where PayPal is visible; implementation takes 30–60 minutes on most platforms. Estimated impact: +$1,500 to +$3,000 / month
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Medium priority "Launch a three-email cart abandonment sequence starting within 60 minutes of abandonment" — recovery rates of 5–11% of lost sales are achievable, and Klaviyo's dataset shows the channel can generate significant revenue even over short windows. Estimated impact: +$1,000 to +$2,500 / month
Notice none of those needed a CSV export. That's the difference between raw analytics and concrete advice.
What is the average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce websites in 2024?
As of 2024, the global cart abandonment rate stood at 70.19%, according to Baymard Institute's aggregation of 50 studies. This means roughly 7 in 10 shoppers who add an item to a cart do not complete the purchase. The figure has remained broadly consistent across recent years, though mobile-specific rates run higher — above 80% in 2024.
Why do most US online shoppers abandon their carts?
The primary reason is unexpected costs — shipping, taxes, and fees that appear for the first time at checkout, cited by 48% of abandoning shoppers. Browsing without immediate purchase intent accounts for 42% of US abandonment. Slow delivery affects 21% of shoppers, and a complicated checkout process drives away another 17–18%. Forced account creation and security concerns each account for roughly a quarter and a fifth of abandonment respectively.
How much can fixing checkout usability improve conversion rates?
Baymard Institute estimates the average large e-commerce site can achieve a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through checkout design improvements alone. Industry-wide, that improvement corresponds to $260 billion in recoverable orders. For an individual store, the gain scales with current traffic and average order value — even a partial improvement delivers meaningful revenue.
What are the most common payment methods preferred by global shoppers?
eWallets are the preferred online payment method for 36% of global shoppers, credit cards for 23%, and debit cards for 12%, according to WooCommerce's payment research. Stores that do not offer the shopper's preferred method lose that transaction — 9% of abandoning shoppers leave specifically because their preferred payment method is unavailable.
Can cart recovery emails effectively increase sales?
Yes. Companies can typically recover between 5% and 11% of otherwise lost sales through cart abandonment email campaigns. Klaviyo's dataset found their customers generated over $60 million from these campaigns in a single three-month window. Performance improves with faster send timing (within 60 minutes), product-specific subject lines, and a sequence of two to three emails rather than a single send.
Sources:
- Baymard Institute — Checkout Usability Research
- Baymard Institute — E-commerce Checkout Usability Report and Benchmark
- Baymard Institute — Cart Abandonment Rate
- Baymard Institute — Current State of Checkout UX
- Shopify Enterprise Blog — How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
- WooCommerce — Optimize WooCommerce Checkout to Improve Conversions
- Geckoboard — Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate KPI
- Growth Engines — E-commerce Checkout Optimization
- Nielsen 2021 PayPal Report (US)
- Attribuly — Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate on Shopify