Why Your Checkout Loses Sales, and What Fixing It Is Worth

Shoppers abandon checkout mostly for reasons a store can fix: extra costs that appear late, being forced to create an account, a long or confusing form, errors, and doubts about paying on the site. Baymard Institute, which tracks this research, puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies, and estimates that a large store can lift its conversion rate by 35.26% through better checkout design alone. For a store owner, that makes the checkout the cheapest place to find more sales, because the visitors are already there with products in the cart.

This article is for owners and managers of online stores, especially on WooCommerce, who see carts being filled but not paid for. It covers the main reasons shoppers leave, what fixing each one is worth, and what a professional checkout review includes.

#How much checkout abandonment costs a store

Checkout abandonment costs a store the difference between the orders it gets and the orders it could get from the same visitors. That gap is large. Baymard Institute's cart abandonment statistics (opens in a new tab) give an average documented rate of 70.22%, the mean of 50 separate studies published from 2006 to 2025, with individual studies ranging from 55% to 84%.

Not all of that is recoverable. In Baymard's survey of US online shoppers, 42% said they had abandoned a cart because they were only browsing or not ready to buy. No checkout design changes that. The rest is where the money is.

Average cart abandonment rate across 50 studies (Baymard Institute)

70.22%

Conversion gain Baymard estimates a large store can get from better checkout design

35.26%

Form elements in the average US checkout, against an ideal of 12 to 14

23.48

Baymard's 35.26% figure is an estimate for the average large ecommerce site, based on checkout usability problems it counts as solvable. Its wider cart and checkout usability research (opens in a new tab) benchmarks 344 top-grossing US and EU ecommerce sites and rates 65% of their checkouts as mediocre or worse. A small store will not see the same numbers, but the direction holds: the checkout is rarely as good as its owner assumes, because the owner knows the form by heart and never sees it fail.

#The main reasons shoppers leave at checkout

The reasons shoppers give are consistent, and most are things the store chose, often without noticing. The table lists the reasons from Baymard's US survey, after removing the "just browsing" group, with what each usually means on a real store. The survey covers US shoppers, so treat the percentages as a guide to the order of the problems, not as exact figures for India.

#Surprise costs at the last step

Late costs are the biggest single cause, and the fix is about honesty, not discounts. A shopper who sees ₹499 on the product page and ₹619 at payment feels misled, even when the shipping charge is fair.

Show delivery charges early: on the product page, in the cart, or as a clear rule such as free delivery above a set order value. If cash on delivery carries a fee, say so before the payment step. The total a customer sees first should be the total they pay.

#Forced account creation

Making people register before they can pay turns a purchase into paperwork. Guest checkout, with an optional account offered after the order, removes the problem. WooCommerce supports guest checkout as a setting, yet many stores have it off because a theme or plugin demo was set up that way.

#A long or confusing form

Every extra field is a reason to stop. Baymard found the average US checkout displays 23.48 form elements by default, while an ideal flow needs 12 to 14, and says most checkouts could remove 20% to 60% of them.

On Indian stores the usual extras are a company name, a second address line, a separate billing address shown by default, and fields left over from a foreign template such as a county. Each should be removed, made optional or hidden until needed. A pincode that fills in the city and state saves typing on a phone, which is where many of your shoppers are.

#Errors, crashes and slow pages

Errors at checkout are the most expensive kind, because the shopper had already decided to buy. They also tend to be invisible to the owner: a payment that fails for one bank, a button that does nothing on one phone, an order that stays pending after money has left the customer's account.

Speed belongs here too. Cart and checkout pages are personal to each shopper, so they cannot be served from a page cache; WooCommerce's guide to configuring caching plugins (opens in a new tab) says cart, checkout and my account must stay dynamic. That makes them the pages most exposed to slow hosting and heavy plugins. My article on what a slow website costs a business covers the evidence linking speed to sales.

#Trust and payment choice

Shoppers leave when the payment step looks unfamiliar or their preferred method is missing. In India that means UPI, cards and netbanking at a minimum, and cash on delivery if your customers expect it. A recognised gateway's payment screen does much of the trust work for you.

A failed payment should lead somewhere useful: a clear message and a one-tap way to retry or switch method, with the cart intact. My guide to WooCommerce payment gateways in India compares the main providers.

#What fixing each problem is worth

A checkout fix is worth the extra orders it recovers, multiplied by your average order value, every month from then on. You can estimate it from numbers you already have. No one can honestly promise a percentage in advance, so use a cautious figure and see whether the fix still pays.

Here is an illustration with made-up round numbers, not a benchmark. A store has 1,000 carts a month and 250 paid orders at an average of ₹1,200. If checkout fixes recover 25 more orders, a tenth more, that is ₹30,000 a month in extra sales from the same traffic and the same ad spend.

The useful comparison is with advertising. Doubling traffic doubles your ad bill every month. A checkout fix is paid for once and keeps working on every visitor after that.

#What a checkout review includes

A checkout review is a structured test of the whole path from cart to confirmation, on real devices, with real payments. Its output is a short list of problems ranked by how much they are likely to cost. This is what I cover when a store owner asks me to look at theirs.

1. Numbers first: where shoppers drop off between cart, checkout and payment, from your analytics and order records.
2. Test orders on real phones: each payment method, on mobile data, including a deliberately failed payment and a retry.
3. The form: every field questioned, labels and error messages checked, keyboard types on mobile checked.
4. Costs and promises: when the shopper first sees delivery charges, the total, the delivery estimate and the returns policy.
5. Errors and order status: pending or failed orders compared with the gateway's records, and plugin conflicts on the checkout page.
6. Speed: how long the cart and checkout take to load and respond.
7. After payment: the confirmation page, the order email and what your team sees.

The fixes themselves fall under WooCommerce checkout and payment gateway work or wider WooCommerce customisation, depending on whether the change is to the checkout or to the theme and cart around it.

#Do it yourself or hire help

You can find a good share of the problems yourself in one evening. Ask a friend who has never used your store to buy something on their phone while you watch, and say nothing. Note every pause. Then check your settings for guest checkout and count your form fields.

Hire help when the problem is technical or when the stakes are high: payments that fail or stay pending, a checkout that breaks after updates, a slow cart, or custom rules such as a COD fee or pincode checks. Changing checkout code on a live store without a test copy is how a small leak becomes no sales at all for a day.

It is also fair to say when a checkout is not the problem. If few visitors reach the cart in the first place, look at product pages, prices and traffic quality before spending on checkout. And for a very small catalogue sold through conversation, a full checkout may not be needed, as I explain in WhatsApp ordering for a small online store.

#A simple next step

Pull three numbers for the last 30 days: carts created, checkouts started and orders paid. The biggest drop between two of them tells you where to look first.

Then place one order yourself on a phone, on mobile data, using the payment method your customers use most. Write down the number of fields you filled, the moment you first saw the final total, and anything that made you hesitate. That single page of notes is the start of any checkout review, whoever does the work. If speed turns out to be the main issue, speeding up a WooCommerce store explains what is involved.