Why Customers Abandon Checkout: Common Causes and How to Fix Them

Customers abandon checkout mainly because of surprises, effort and doubt. The most common reasons in Baymard's research are extra costs being too high, slow delivery, not trusting the site with card details, forced account creation, a long or complicated checkout and site errors. Returns policies, hidden totals, declined cards and missing payment methods follow. To fix abandonment, first find which causes apply to your store. Use step-by-step drop-off, field errors, payment failures, recordings and test orders, then fix the causes in order of how many shoppers they affect.

Baymard Institute's abandonment research asked US online shoppers who had abandoned an order during checkout why they left. Excluding shoppers who were just browsing, the reasons were:

Baymard's documented average cart abandonment rate across 50 studies is around 70%, but that includes people comparing prices, saving items and browsing. Focus on the reasons you can influence, and measure progress against your own baseline rather than a universal target.

Costs that appear late break the price shoppers had in mind. Show delivery costs or thresholds on product pages and in the cart, show taxes the way your market expects (for example, tax-inclusive prices where that's the norm), and avoid fees that appear only at the end. If your delivery costs are genuinely high, explain what customers get, or absorb part of the cost into the product price and test the effect on margin.

Show delivery options with dates and prices, not just service names. Offer faster delivery where you can, and pickup or local delivery where relevant. For gifts and events, a clear “arrives by” date can matter more than price.

Make guest checkout the easy default and offer an account after the order, on the confirmation page. Baymard recommends saving account creation for the confirmation step; returning customers can still sign in or use saved wallet details.

Baymard's checkout benchmark found an average of 11.3 form fields, while most sites need only 8. Remove fields you don't use, default billing to the delivery address, use address lookup and support autofill with correct autocomplete attributes.

Declined cards and missing payment methods each account for a meaningful share of abandonment in Baymard's data. Review failures by method, device and country; offer wallets and the local methods your customers use; and keep the order and entered details when a payment fails, with a clear explanation and a way to try another method.

Shoppers hesitate to enter card details on sites that look unfamiliar or inconsistent. Keep checkout visually consistent with the store, show recognizable payment options, place reassurance next to the payment fields and keep contact details and policies visible.

Validation errors that clear the form, server errors at payment and address formats that reject valid addresses all drive shoppers away. Validate inline after each field, explain how to fix errors, preserve input and test international addresses, discount codes and edge cases regularly.

On phones, typing is slower and interruptions are common. Offer express wallets early, use the right input types and keyboards, keep buttons large and make sure checkout survives switching apps. Test checkout inside social apps' built-in browsers if a lot of your traffic comes from social.

13% of Baymard's respondents said the returns policy wasn't satisfactory. Summarize returns terms in plain language near the payment step and on product pages, and make the full policy one click away.

Slow steps and long payment processing make shoppers wonder whether something is wrong. Keep checkout scripts lean, show progress while payments process and prevent duplicate submissions. Measure real-user performance on checkout-bound pages. See the real cost of a slow checkout.

Match each possible cause to evidence before fixing it.

Because checkout changes affect revenue immediately, validate them. Where traffic allows, A/B test changes; otherwise release one change at a time, compare with a stable baseline and watch errors and support contacts. See ecommerce A/B testing.

Checkout abandonment has well-documented causes, but their mix differs by store. Use the research as a checklist, confirm which causes apply with your own evidence, and fix them in order of impact: costs, delivery, accounts, forms, payments, trust, errors and mobile. For design principles, see ecommerce checkout UX; on Shopify, see Shopify checkout optimization.

For related guides, see clearer delivery information.