Why shoppers abandon carts: extra costs lead the list, and the checkout is where it is decided
Baymard Institute's 2025 survey of 1,026 US online shoppers, as published by Statista on May 28, 2025, ranks the reasons for abandoning an order during checkout: extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees lead at 39 percent, then delivery too slow at 21 percent, a required account and distrust of the site with card details at 19 percent each, and a long or complicated checkout at 18 percent. Statista's May 12, 2026 overview of cart abandonment by industry worldwide, from Dynamic Yield data, dated April 2026 in its title (April 2025 in its data file), puts beauty and personal care sites highest at 84.82 percent and US mobile abandonment ten percentage points above desktop. Baymard's own page, updated September 22, 2025, puts the average documented abandonment rate at 70.22 percent across 50 studies and extra costs at 40 percent in its latest run of the reasons study.
- 39% Name Extra Costs Such As Shipping, Tax And Fees, US 2025, Just Browsing Set Aside, Baymard
- 70.22% Average Documented Cart Abandonment Rate Across 50 Studies, Baymard
- 21% Abandon Over Slow Delivery, US 2025, Just Browsing Set Aside, Baymard
The top reason is the one the last mile owns: shipping is the first cost named in it and slow delivery is the second reason outright, so the fee and the date shown at checkout are conversion levers before they are cost lines. The operators presenting cost per stop and delivery promise work in Las Vegas are working on the same number as the e-commerce team, and carriers and final mile specialists, who price that number, are selling into a conversion decision. A ten point gap between mobile and desktop abandonment in the US puts the fee, the date and the delivery options on a phone screen in charge of the sale, which is where delivery promise, visibility and customer communication tools make their case. Most of the list is fixable, and Baymard prices the fix at a 35.26 percent conversion gain for the average large site, 260 billion dollars of recoverable US and EU orders: account walls, checkout length, trust and total cost visibility are design decisions, and the returns policy line puts reverse logistics on the conversion page, where returns management and recommerce suppliers can carry a revenue argument rather than a cost one. One dating note: the reasons chart is Baymard's 2025 run as published by Statista in May 2025; Baymard's own page, updated September 22, 2025, shows its latest run, undated on the page, with extra costs at 40 percent and slow delivery at 20 percent, the same two reasons at the top.