Why people leave your store at checkout, and what brings them back
Most carts never become orders. The reasons shoppers give are specific, and nearly all of them are things your store controls.
September 25, 2026
What the research shows.
About 70% of online shopping carts never become orders. That's the average across 50 studies collected by the Baymard Institute, so if most of your carts go nowhere, you're normal. But much of it is fixable. When Baymard asked shoppers why they left, setting aside people who were just browsing, the top reasons were:
- 40%Extra costs too high: shipping, tax, fees
- 20%Delivery was too slow
- 19%Didn't trust the site with their card
- 18%Had to create an account
- 17%Checkout too long or complicated
- 17%The site had errors or crashed
Every one of those is something your store controls.
What's really going on.
The shipping price usually appears last, after people have decided what they're willing to pay. The fix isn't always cheaper shipping. It's showing the cost earlier and giving people a real way to reach free shipping. On one store we built, we set the free-shipping threshold where a normal order could reach it and designed bundles that land just above it.
Checkouts that force you to create an account often do so because an app or a setting asks for one, not because you chose it.
And the errors that cost you most are the ones you never see: a discount code that fails on phones, or an app update that quietly breaks the cart. You only catch those by testing the real checkout on a real phone after every change.
What you can do this week.
Place a test order on your phone, start to finish, as a new customer, and write down every surprise.
In Shopify, go to Settings → Customer accounts and make sure an account isn't required to check out.
Put your shipping costs and free-shipping threshold where people see them before the cart.
Turn on express payment buttons like Shop Pay and Apple Pay, under Settings → Payments.
What we take off your plate.
That list is a start. The harder part is finding what's specific to your store: the step people actually leave at, the app that slows your cart, whether your free-shipping threshold matches what people buy.
That means reading your store's data, testing checkout on real devices after every change, and fixing what turns up. We do all of that as part of building and looking after a store, and you never have to learn how.
Talk to us about your storeSources
- Baymard Institute, 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics (2026)
The 70.22% average across 50 studies, and the reasons for abandonment with “just browsing” set aside. Read at the source on 2026-09-25.