Checkout abandonment rate measures the share of shoppers who start your checkout process without completing a purchase. The rate is calculated by subtracting completed orders from checkout sessions, then dividing by total checkout sessions. It’s an actionable metric in ecommerce because the shoppers it captures have demonstrated purchase intent.

Below, we’ll discuss the average checkout abandonment rate across ecommerce categories, some points that cause drop-off at each stage of the flow, and structural changes that can improve completion rates.

Key takeaways

• Checkout abandonment rate is an actionable metric in ecommerce. It identifies shoppers who have demonstrated purchase intent.

• Common causes of checkout abandonment are surprise costs, mandatory account creation, and limited payment options.

• Tools that accelerate checkout for returning customers by prepopulating saved payment and shipping details drive measurable improvements in conversion.

What is checkout abandonment rate?

Checkout abandonment occurs when customers begin the checkout process and exit before completing the purchase. Checkout abandonment often gets conflated with cart abandonment, but they measure different problems. Cart abandonment happens when a shopper adds items and leaves without starting checkout.

What’s a good checkout abandonment rate across ecommerce categories?

Ecommerce abandonment rates range from 50% to nearly 90% for major categories.

In general, industries with higher average order value and purchases that carry a lot of consequences have higher abandonment rates. Everyday purchases have more follow-through. Groceries and food sit at the lower end (50.03%), while travel and finance purchases tend to sit above 80%. Electronics is a middle-of-the-road category at 70.83%.

A few other factors drive variance within any category:

• Mobile vs. desktop: At 76.98%, mobile abandonment runs 12.2 percentage points higher than desktop (64.78%). If your checkout is responsive rather than purpose-built for mobile, you might be losing orders that desktop would have captured.

• New vs. returning customers: First-time customers face more uncertainty: unfamiliar brand, unclear return policy, no saved payment details. Returning customers face fewer hurdles by default.

Why do customers abandon during checkout?

Many exits happen for specific, identifiable reasons in the checkout flow, and most are fixable.

Here are some common causes for checkout abandonment:

• Surprise costs: Shoppers who see a $12 shipping fee for the first time on the confirmation screen might feel deceived, even if the fee is standard.

• Mandatory account creation: Requiring registration before purchasing is an obstacle between the shopper and what they want. Many won’t clear it.

• Excessive form fields: Separate billing and shipping address fields, redundant confirmation fields, and phone number fields that aren’t needed for fulfillment can all make the shopper hesitate.

• Limited payment options: A shopper whose preferred method isn’t available might not use a less-preferred option.

• Website errors: Crashes or other technical problems can derail willing customers.

• Security uncertainty: If your checkout feels risky, some shoppers might exit before entering payment details.

How do you refine your checkout flow to reduce drop-off?

Every decision a shopper must make can chip away at their willingness to complete the purchase. Get them through checkout as quickly as possible with these tactics:

• Collapse the flow: Consider a single-page or two-step checkout with an accordion layout. That collapses completed steps into summaries instead of a multipage flow. When the whole checkout is visible at once, shoppers can see exactly how close they are to done.

• Offer guest checkout up front: Don’t hide the guest option or make account creation the default. Put it at the top, make it obvious, and let shoppers create an account post-purchase if they want to.

• Display a persistent order summary: Cart contents, subtotal, and shipping estimate should be visible throughout the checkout process, not only on a final review screen. Shoppers who can’t see what they’re buying can second-guess the transaction.

• Use inline address validation: Real-time validation that flags errors as the shopper types is less disruptive than a page reload with error messages, which push shoppers out of the flow.

• Autopopulate wherever possible: Browser autofill, saved addresses for returning customers, and automatic city/state population from ZIP code entry all reduce manual input. Less typing means fewer obstacles.

• Disclose all costs early: Show shipping estimates on the product page or at the start of checkout. If there are taxes, surface them before the shopper reaches the payment step, not after they’ve committed mentally to a total.

How do payment options affect checkout completion rates?

Payment preferences vary; they can shift by age, geography, and purchase context. Here’s how some popular payment types can affect checkout completion:

Cards and digital wallets

Traditional cards are still the baseline in the US, but globally, digital wallets now account for a substantial share of ecommerce transactions. Digital wallet payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay eliminate manual card entry, which can speed up checkout. The shopper just authenticates with a fingerprint or face ID, and the payment details populate automatically.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL)

BNPL options have become table stakes in certain categories (apparel and technology devices especially). Splitting a payment over time can be the difference between a purchase happening and a shopper leaving. BNPL providers such as Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm have their own customer bases, and offering those providers surfaces your checkout to shoppers who filter by payment availability before they ever reach your site.

Local payment methods

Bank payments and local methods matter for specific customer segments and geographies (Automated Clearing House [ACH] in the US, iDEAL | Wero in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium). If a significant share of your traffic comes from outside your home market, the absence of familiar local options will likely show up in your abandonment rate.

Recognizable payment brand logos on your checkout page function as a trust signal independent of the mechanics. They tell the shopper that familiar, protected payment systems are in use, which matters at the moment they’re being asked to enter payment information. Stripe supports a wide range of payment methods through a single integration and can even surface the right options for a given customer’s location and device automatically. A shopper in Germany might see Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) transfers and Klarna, while a US shopper might see ACH transfers and Affirm.

How does accelerated checkout reduce abandonment?

Accelerated checkout addresses part of the flow where friction is high: the moment a returning customer must reenter payment and shipping details they’ve entered before.

The process is straightforward: a shopper’s payment credentials and shipping address are stored after their first purchase; on a subsequent visit, those details are recalled and prepopulated. The shopper confirms their identity—for example, via SMS verification on a new device—and completes the purchase without reentering anything.

Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe, is one implementation of this. When a returning customer reaches checkout on a site using Stripe, Link recognizes their email address, sends a verification if they’re on a new device, and populates their saved payment and shipping details automatically. Stripe’s data shows an average conversion uplift of 14% for returning users who check out through Link.

How do you measure the impact of checkout improvements?

Before making checkout changes, instrument your funnel with event-level tracking at each step (checkout initiated, shipping address entered, payment method selected, payment submitted, order confirmed) so you can see where drop-off is happening.

Segment that data by three variables that help reveal different abandonment patterns:

• Device type: Mobile and desktop often have different drop-off profiles. A fix that moves desktop numbers might do nothing for mobile, and vice versa.

• Customer type: New vs. returning customers abandon for different reasons. High returning-customer abandonment points to a different problem than high new-customer abandonment.

• Traffic source: Shoppers arriving from paid search behave differently from those arriving from email or organic. Source-level segmentation can help you determine whether an abandonment problem is checkout-specific or audience-specific.

Once you have baseline data, run controlled tests, one variable at a time. Each change (adding a payment method, collapsing the form, surfacing shipping costs earlier) should have a control group to be attributable so you don’t confuse seasonal fluctuation or traffic mix shifts with checkout improvements. The goal is a measurement practice that keeps producing accurate signals as your checkout evolves.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment user interfaces (UIs), access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.

• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.