Out of 100 carts created, about 70 leave without an order. That's the average across fifty studies compiled by Baymard.
The stated reasons are well known, led by added fees and slow delivery. Some of these carts can't be recovered, and others exist only in your report.
The benchmark
“It really eats at us, well, at me. […] Something like 80% of customers who add to cart don't go through to the order. And we wondered: is that normal?”
A brand the authors work with asked this question in a meeting, a few months after a platform change. The analyst answered with another question: “Maybe it's your measuring tool?”
We had run into this before. In two other cases, the numbers showed 90% and 94% cart abandonment. Faced with the first, one of us said in an internal meeting, “I don't know why.”
Part of the answer lies in what each tool counts. The Shopify conversion report counts sessions, while the GA4 “Purchase journey” report counts users.
Someone who fills a cart on Monday and orders on Thursday makes two sessions in Shopify, and Monday's stays a cart with no order.
In GA4, if they come back on the same device, that's one person, and they bought. The fifty studies on the list themselves range from 55% to 84%. So compare your rate with your own earlier periods, calculated the same way.
As for the stated reasons, Baymard's US survey sets one aside first: 42% of respondents say they've abandoned a cart because they were just browsing. Here's what the others cite:
| Reason cited | Share of people citing it | Where to address it (our take) |
|---|---|---|
| Extra costs too high | 40% | Product page and cart |
| Delivery too slow | 20% | Estimated date on the product page |
| Didn't trust the site with their card | 19% | Checkout |
| Forced account creation | 18% | First step of checkout |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% | Fields and steps |
| Errors or crashes | 17% | Technical |
Delivery and account creation each have their own page.
The rule
Find the step that breaks before looking for the cause.
Between adding to cart and ordering, there are two: opening the checkout, then paying. On a store audited in March 2026, 54.9% of opened checkouts went through to payment, a level we consider solid, yet 54.4% of carts never opened the checkout.
Put together, these two rates mean about one cart in four turns into an order. That's 75% abandonment, nearly three-quarters of it before the checkout even opens.
The audit found two main causes: mandatory account creation and shipping fees that stayed hidden until checkout.
When few carts open the checkout, look at what the cart page announces or hides, starting with fees and the return policy. If the checkout opens but is rarely completed, move on to fields, payment methods and errors.
The steps
- The check. Compare the orders your analytics tool sees with those in your store, and don't comment on any rate until the gap is explained.
- The chain. Over a rolling twelve months, keep one row per month: sessions, product pages viewed, add-to-carts, checkouts started, orders.
- The transitions. Calculate the rate from each step to the next, then use the year's median as your benchmark. Your best month often contains a promotion that won't come back.
- The segments. Separate devices, then new visits and returning visits. When paid acquisition doubles, the average can drop without a single page having changed.
- The dates. In the same table, note every change of theme, app, carrier, free-shipping threshold or consent banner, as in a logbook.
- The fields. Count the ones in your checkout. The average Baymard found in 2024 is 11.3, when most sites need only eight.
The trap
The trap is cutting the number of steps in the checkout rather than the number of fields. The average checkout has 5.1 steps, and the same study finds that the number of fields weighs far more heavily on the experience.
Two of them show up on most sites even though you can do without them: the name split in two (89%) and the address line 2 field displayed permanently instead of tucked behind a link (75%).
The sentence to present
Once the table is filled in, sum it up in three sentences. Copy this template, whose numbers are fictional, then rewrite it with your own for your leadership team:
“Out of 100 carts, 46 open the checkout and 25 become an order. Our twelve-month median is 52 openings: the step from cart to checkout is what slipped, since the carrier change in March. I propose showing shipping fees right in the cart before touching the checkout.”
