What 14 years of checkout usability data tells merchants about abandonment
A 70.19% cart abandonment rate is not a rounding error. It is the current global average tracked by Baymard Institute across 14 years of large-scale checkout usability research, and it represents the single most important conversion problem most online merchants are not treating with the urgency it deserves.
Baymard’s research programme is one of the most rigorous in ecommerce. Their methodology combines qualitative usability testing with real end-users on the live checkout flows of leading ecommerce sites, supplemented by UX audits across more than 150 retailers. What makes their findings particularly useful for merchants is the consistent conclusion: poor checkout design is frequently the sole reason a shopper who has already added items to their cart does not complete the purchase. The shopper had intent. The checkout destroyed it.
The causes split into two broad patterns. Some users leave in frustration, hitting a wall of unnecessary friction, confusing field labels, or opaque error messages. Others simply do not know how to complete a specific field and have no path forward. Both scenarios are recoverable with design changes that cost far less than the revenue being lost.
For Dutch and Belgian online merchants, this research carries direct implications. The Dutch market in particular has a high baseline of payment-method familiarity, with iDEAL embedded deep in shopper expectations, yet even well-known payment steps can fail at the UX level if surrounding checkout fields are poorly designed or the flow introduces unnecessary steps. Belgian shoppers face similar friction when language switching, address validation, or delivery-method presentation is handled carelessly. Neither market is immune to the problems Baymard’s testing surfaces repeatedly.
The practical starting point is an honest audit of your own checkout flow against Baymard’s published guidelines, paying close attention to form field design, error handling, guest checkout access, and the number of steps between cart and confirmation. Many of the highest-impact fixes are low-cost. The research makes clear that incremental improvements to checkout UX compound directly into measurable conversion gains, which is a more reliable return than most top-of-funnel spending.
Source: baymard.com
