$260 Billion are Recoverable through Checkout Optimizations

In fact, latest quantitative study of reasons for abandonment found that 58.6% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart within the last 3 months because “I was just browsing / not ready to buy”. Most of these will abandon even before they initiate the checkout flow.

Unlike the “just browsing” segment, a lot of these issues can be resolved. In fact, many of them can be fixed purely through design changes. Let’s take a look at just 1 of 134 examples in our new checkout research study:

• 18% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a “too long / complicated checkout process”.
• Now, our large-scale checkout usability testing shows that an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12-14 form elements (7-8 if only counting the form fields).
• Yet, our checkout benchmark database reveals that the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements displayed to users by default. (14.88 if only counting the form fields.)

In other words, nearly 1 out of 5 shoppers have abandoned a cart in the last quarter due to a “too long / complicated checkout process”, yet for most checkouts it’s possible to make a 20-60% reduction in the number of form elements shown to users during the default checkout flow. And again, this is just 1 of the 134 documented causes for checkout usability issues.

If we look at the combined e-commerce sales of $738 billion in the US and EU, the potential for a 35.26% increase in conversion rate translates to $260 billion worth of lost orders which are recoverable solely through a better checkout flow & design.

• Read more: https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate