Why people leave at checkout
Kukar-Kinney and Close (2010) show many shoppers use carts as holding areas or price checks and that unexpected costs drive abandonment. Data compiled by the Baymard Institute (n.d.) put abandonment near 70%, citing extra shipping costs, forced accounts and long processes. Show shipping and totals from the cart onward.
Reducing input
Defer account creation and allow guest checkout. The Baymard Institute (n.d.) finds checkouts carry more fields than needed: use one name field, address search and 'same as shipping' billing by default. Correct autocomplete attributes let devices fill saved data. Seckler et al. (2014) found such guidelines speed entry and cut errors, and WCAG 2.2 (W3C, 2023) 3.3.7 discourages redundant entry, applying mobile form usability.
Trust and testing
Gefen et al. (2003) show trust shapes purchase intent. Show familiar payment logos, clear refund policies and security cues, avoid jarring redesigned pages, and use a sticky bottom button with the total. Sneaked-in add-ons cost trust. Test changes (Kohavi et al., 2009) watching conversion and refund rates.
FAQ
- Does guest checkout cut sign-ups?
- Offer account creation with just a password on the confirmation screen.
- How many steps?
- No fixed number; fewer fields and no surprise costs matter more than step count.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-27
References
- Kukar-Kinney, M., & Close, A. G. (2010). The determinants of consumers' online shopping cart abandonment. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38(2), 240–250. Empirical study of why shoppers abandon carts.
- Gefen, D., Karahanna, E., & Straub, D. W. (2003). Trust and TAM in online shopping: An integrated model. MIS Quarterly, 27(1), 51–90. Models trust in online purchasing.
- Seckler, M., Heinz, S., Bargas-Avila, J. A., Opwis, K., & Tuch, A. N. (2014). Designing usable web forms: Empirical evaluation of web form improvement guidelines. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1275–1284). ACM. Experimental test of web form guidelines.
- Baymard Institute. (n.d.). Cart abandonment rate statistics. Aggregated cart abandonment rates and reasons.
- Baymard Institute. (n.d.). Checkout optimization: Minimize form fields. Analysis of average checkout form fields.
- Kohavi, R., Longbotham, R., Sommerfield, D., & Henne, R. M. (2009). Controlled experiments on the web: Survey and practical guide. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 18(1), 140–181. Guide for validating checkout changes with experiments.
- World Wide Web Consortium. (2023). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. Criteria 3.3.7 (redundant entry) and 3.3.4 for payments.