Average Checkout Completion Rate for Shopify (2026 Benchmarks)

The average checkout completion rate for a Shopify store is 45%. More than 59% puts you in the best 20% of Shopify stores, and more than 66% puts you in the best 10%.(source)

Put another way: on a typical Shopify store, more than half of the people who begin checkout never finish it. These are not browsers. They picked a product, went to the cart, and started handing over their details. Then they stopped.

Here is the full benchmark set, what causes the drop-off, and which parts of it a Shopify merchant can actually do something about.

The Shopify checkout benchmarks

Source: Littledata, from a benchmark of 2,800 sites, Shopify-specific rather than all-ecommerce.

One caveat on vintage. Littledata’s benchmark dataset is from 2023 and is refreshed periodically rather than monthly. Treat these as stable structural benchmarks rather than a live market read. For a figure that moves month to month, the conversion-rate benchmarks carry IRP Commerce data that updates monthly.

Checkout completion is not cart abandonment

These get mixed up constantly, and mixing them up will make you work on the wrong thing.

• Cart abandonment counts everyone who put something in a cart and did not buy. The widely cited average is 70.22%, from Baymard’s average of 50 studies.
• Checkout completion counts only people who actually started checkout, and finished. Shopify average: 45%.

Checkout is the later, higher-intent stage, so its numbers look much healthier. Both are real, they just measure different populations. We cover the first number in depth in the cart abandonment benchmarks, which is where the 70.22% figure comes from and what it does and does not include.

Stack the whole funnel and the shape of the business becomes obvious:

The add-to-cart step is where the largest raw volume is lost, since about 95 in 100 visitors never add anything. But checkout is where the most valuable visitors are lost, and a lost checkout is far cheaper to recover than a new visitor is to acquire.

Why people abandon checkout

Baymard asked. The single biggest answer is one you cannot fix: 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing / not ready to buy”.(source)

Set that group aside, and the remaining reasons look like this:

Source: Baymard Institute.

Read that list carefully and something jumps out: most of these are decided before the customer reaches the payment step. Extra costs, delivery speed, returns policy and up-front total cost are all information problems. The customer did not fail at checkout, they discovered something at checkout that they would have wanted to know on the product page.

That is the single most useful reframe here. A “checkout problem” is usually a disclosure problem wearing a checkout costume.

The Shopify-specific catch

Baymard’s headline structural finding is about form length. Their checkout benchmark database shows the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements by default (14.88 counting only the form fields), while their usability testing finds an ideal flow can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements (7 to 8 fields).(source)

Here is the problem with acting on that as a Shopify merchant: you are running a hosted checkout that you largely do not control. Shopify replaced the old checkout.liquid customisation model with checkout extensibility, and the surfaces available to you are narrower and more structured than “delete some fields”. We wrote up what changed and how to validate your setup in Shopify checkout extensibility.

So the classic “cut your form fields by 40%” advice is mostly not yours to action. Which is fine, because Shopify’s hosted checkout is already fairly short and fast, and it converts better than the average bespoke checkout Baymard is measuring. The corollary matters more: since you cannot rebuild the form, nearly all of your available leverage is upstream of it.

Similarly, Baymard’s estimate that the average large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design comes from a decade of testing large US and EU sites such as Walmart, Amazon and Wayfair.(source) It is a real number for that population. It is an upper bound, not a forecast, for a Shopify store on a hosted checkout.

What you can actually change

Ordered by how often it is the real problem:

1. Show the delivered cost earlier. Extra costs top the fixable-reasons list at 40%, and 12% say they could not calculate the total up front. Shipping thresholds on the product page and in the cart, and a plain statement of what shipping will cost, move this before checkout ever loads.
2. Enable guest checkout and express payment. 18% abandon over forced account creation, and 9% over payment method availability. Both are settings, not projects.
3. State delivery timing, not just cost. Delivery being too slow is the second-largest fixable reason at 20%. If your dispatch is quick, saying so is free.
4. Put the returns policy where the hesitation is. 13% abandon over it, and they are not reading your footer.
5. Look for actual errors. 17% report the site had errors or crashed. That is a startlingly high number and it is the one people assume does not apply to them.

That last one deserves emphasis, because it is the only item on the list you cannot fix by writing better copy. It is also the one benchmarks cannot detect: an error affecting one payment method on one browser will not move your average enough to notice, and will quietly cost you those orders every month.

Finding your own number, and your own reason

Shopify Analytics gives you the conversion funnel, so you can read your own checkout completion rate directly and compare it against the 45% average and the 59% and 66% thresholds above. Do that first, split by device, and see whether your mobile-to-desktop gap is wider than the benchmark five points.

The benchmark tells you whether you have a problem. It cannot tell you which of the ten reasons above is yours. For that you need to watch the sessions that failed:

• Filter to sessions that reached checkout and did not order. That is the exact cohort the 45% is about.
• Watch for hesitation at the shipping line, which is the signature of the extra-costs problem.
• Watch for rage clicks and dead clicks, which is what an error or an unresponsive control looks like from the visitor’s side.
• Compare mobile against desktop separately. They usually fail for different reasons, and mobile checkout has its own failure modes.

Propel Replays does this natively on Shopify, and its insight alerts surface the biggest abandoned checkouts specifically, so the highest-value failures come to you instead of being buried in a session list. Merchants on Shopify Plus can also record the checkout itself on the Enterprise plan. But the method matters more than the tool: whatever you use, look at the cohort that failed rather than at aggregate traffic.

The honest summary

If you are at 45%, you are average, and average means half your highest-intent shoppers leave. Most of them left over something they learned too late, not something that broke. Fix the disclosure first, then go looking for the errors, and only then worry about the parts of the checkout Shopify does not let you touch anyway.

Sources

• Littledata Shopify benchmarks, 2,800-site dataset (checkout completion 45% / 59% / 66%, mobile 44% and best-10% 64%, desktop 49% and best-10% 70%, add-to-cart rate 4.6%, conversion rate 1.4%).
• Baymard Institute cart abandonment rate, 70.22% averaged across 50 studies, reasons-for-abandonment distribution, 23.48 average form elements versus a 12 to 14 ideal, and the 35.26% potential conversion gain for large sites.