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Checkout Abandonment
Checkout Abandonment
Shoppers who begin the checkout flow — entering personal or payment information — but leave before placing the order. Distinct from cart abandonment and operationally more recoverable because these users have already provided contact details.
Definition: cart vs. checkout abandonment
| Type | Trigger point | Contact available? | Recovery method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cart abandonment | Item added to cart; checkout not started | Usually no (anonymous) | Retargeting ads, on-site prompts |
| Checkout abandonment | Checkout flow started; order not placed | Yes (email captured) | Email/SMS recovery flows |
BlueSnap notes the operational significance: "Cart abandoners never started the checkout process, whereas checkout abandonment happens after they've begun checkout and entered their email." Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
[!key-insight] Most brands conflate the two flows Max Sturtevant (2026) reports approximately 80% of audited 7–9 figure brands have their abandoned cart flow misconfigured — using a "checkout started" trigger instead of an "added to cart" trigger, and thereby missing the larger, higher-funnel abandonment audience. When both flows were correctly set up, the cart flow generated more revenue than the checkout flow ($10k vs $7.6k in one cited 30-day period). YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Benchmarks (as-of 2025-09-22)
Baymard Institute meta-analysis of 50 studies: 70.22% (Sept 2025) — most methodologically transparent primary source Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 Dynamic Yield: 75.45% (methodology unstated) Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 Salesforce Commerce Cloud: 72.6% desktop / 87.3% mobile (own platform population) Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 Likely causes of divergence: different definitions of "abandonment", different measurement populations (own-platform vs. cross-industry), and whether cart and checkout abandonment are conflated.
By device (as-of 2026):
- Mobile: 85–87% (Adobe Analytics / Google & Ipsos)
- Desktop: ~73%
- Tablet: ~80–82%
Financial scale (as-of 2026):
- NRF: $4.6 trillion in products sit in globally abandoned carts annually (volatile — secondary citation)
- McKinsey: $260 billion annually recoverable in US and EU through optimised checkout and follow-up (volatile — secondary citation)
Causes
Ranked by Baymard Institute primary research (as-of 2025-09-22) — excludes "just browsing" segment:
| Cause | % of abandoners |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) | 39% |
| Delivery too slow | 21% |
| Didn't trust site with credit card info | 19% |
| Mandatory account creation | 19% |
| Too long / complicated checkout | 18% |
| Couldn't see total cost upfront | 17% |
| Unsatisfactory returns policy | 15% |
Source: Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Baymard puts mandatory account creation at 19% Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 VS NNGroup puts it at 24% (cited secondary). Baymard is more methodologically transparent. NNGroup also reports that implementing guest checkout reduces this to 7.3% of abandonment events.
Additional causes surfaced by practitioners (Reddit, 2024–2026):
- Misaligned free-shipping threshold vs. AOV — if most carts sit at £48–£50 and the threshold is £50, shoppers hit the total-cost wall at checkout and leave. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
- Expired affiliate coupon codes — coupon aggregator sites list old codes; shoppers try them at checkout, they fail, they abandon. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
- CTA below fold requiring scroll — screen recording analysis at Verifone showed users abandoning when they had to scroll to see the buy button. YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
- Bot inflation — a meaningful portion of measured ~70% abandonment is click-fraud bots trained to mimic conversion intent. Practitioners reported significant bot-driven cart inflation in 2025–2026. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Recovery: email and SMS flows
Recovery rate benchmarks (as-of 2026):
- PluginHive (2026): abandoned cart emails can recover 10–20% of lost sales YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
- McKinsey: best-in-class brands recover 18–26% of lost transactions via streamlined checkout + AI-personalised retargeting within 30 minutes (volatile — secondary citation) Web — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Recommended sequence (Max Sturtevant, 2026 — based on auditing 7–9 figure DTC brands):
- Email 1 — graphic reminder — 30 minutes after abandonment
- Email 2 — plain-text founder note — +1 day
- Email 3 — education + discount offer — +1 day
- Email 4 — plain-text discount expiry — +1 day
Max Sturtevant (2026) recommends 4 emails (30min / +1d / +1d / +1d) and explicitly argues against longer sequences YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15. PluginHive (2026) recommends 3 touchpoints (1h / 24h / 48h) YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15. Both sources agree on brevity; the timing and count differ. No controlled A/B data available to settle this.
r/shopify (23 upvotes, 2026): "No one will open them in 2026. People are tired of them." Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 r/shopify (11 upvotes, 2026): "A good flow setup should contribute 15–30% of your revenue." Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15 Technical counterpoint from r/shopify (2026): declining email performance may be Shopify's native pixel missing ~40% of add-to-cart events on mobile — a tracking failure, not email fatigue. Fix: configure the Conversions API between Shopify and Klaviyo. One practitioner reported open rate recovering from 16% to 34% after the fix. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
One school: send a discount in email 1 to recover the sale fast. Opposing school: delay the discount to email 3 — you might recover the sale with a nudge alone, and offering discounts immediately trains customers to abandon deliberately to receive them. A sub-segment of shoppers has been conditioned by "save money" content to abandon carts specifically to wait for the discount code. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
SMS as an alternative (emerging 2025–2026, r/shopify):
- Multiple practitioners reporting SMS outperforms email for impulse-buy recovery, especially on mobile
- Requires explicit consent (GDPR/UK data rules — legal nuances not well-covered in sources)
- One practitioner reported "crazy difference" after switching from email to SMS for clothing/luxury niche Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Technical gotchas for Klaviyo users (Max Sturtevant, 2026):
- Disable "Smart Sending" for abandonment flows — it silently skips users who received any email in the past 16 hours, causing lost recovery revenue YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
- Abandoned cart and abandoned checkout flows use different dynamic link properties — cannot simply duplicate one from the other YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Prevention vs. recovery
Practitioners consistently frame prevention (fixing the checkout experience) as higher-ROI than recovery (email/SMS flows):
- Surface shipping costs early — on PDP or cart, not at the payment step
- Offer guest checkout; prompt account creation post-order
- Reduce form fields (Baymard: average checkout has 14.88 fields; reducing to 7 yields 35.62% conversion lift — secondary citation)
- Move CTA above fold
- Position security trust badges directly below the buy button
- Offer one-click payment options (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay)
One practitioner survey method: gate a substantial discount behind 2–3 on-exit questions. After 2–3 months of responses, address the objections directly on the page. Reported 25% conversion rate lift. Reddit — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Checkout layout research
Nicoleta Danileț (Verifone CRO team) presented a test replacing a one-column vertical checkout with a three-column horizontal layout at Experiment Nation (2023). Hypothesis: a more compact, above-the-fold layout separating order summary / personal info / card details would reduce scroll friction and lower abandonment. Screen recordings showed users abandoning when forced to scroll to see the CTA. The three-column template was subsequently validated across additional merchants and added to 2Checkout's permanent template gallery. Actual conversion lift percentage was not disclosed in the talk. YouTube — Checkout Abandonment 2026-06-15
Key terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Cart abandonment | Item added to cart; checkout not started |
| Checkout abandonment | Checkout flow started; order not placed |
| Recovery flow | Automated email/SMS sequence triggered by abandonment event |
| Smart Sending | Klaviyo feature that suppresses emails to recently-emailed profiles — should be disabled for abandonment flows |
| Add-to-cart trigger | The correct trigger for an abandoned cart flow (higher-funnel, larger audience) |
| Checkout started trigger | Lower-funnel trigger; many brands use this alone and miss the larger cart-abandonment audience |
| Bot inflation | Click-fraud bots mimicking add-to-cart behaviour, inflating reported abandonment rates |