Out of every 100 customers who add a product to their cart on a typical Shopify store, only about 30 complete the purchase. The other 70 leave, often within reach of finishing

Out of every 100 customers who add a product to their cart on a typical Shopify store, only about 30 complete the purchase. The other 70 leave, often within reach of finishing

Baymard Institute’s research, aggregating 50 separate studies, puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. What’s striking isn’t just the size of that number — it’s how stable it’s been. Despite a decade of improvements in checkout technology, faster page loads, and more payment options, the abandonment rate has barely moved.

The reasons shoppers give are consistent and, more importantly, addressable. The single largest cause, cited by 48% of abandoners, is unexpected costs — shipping, tax, or fees that only appear at the final step of checkout, after a customer has already committed mentally to buying. A quarter of abandoners leave because they’re forced to create an account rather than being offered a guest checkout option. Another 24% cite slow delivery estimates, and 19% say they simply didn’t trust the site enough to hand over card details, usually due to a lack of visible trust signals.

There’s a device gap worth paying close attention to as well. Desktop abandonment runs around 62–66%, while mobile abandonment climbs to 76–80% — a substantial difference, and one that matters more each year as mobile continues to account for the majority of ecommerce traffic. A store that hasn’t specifically optimized its mobile checkout is likely losing a disproportionate share of an already-large leak.

What makes this data encouraging rather than discouraging is that almost every top reason for abandonment has a direct, known fix: surfacing shipping and tax costs earlier in the shopping experience, keeping guest checkout available, and building a checkout flow that genuinely works well on a small screen. None of these require acquiring new customers — they simply require keeping more of the ones already arriving at checkout.