Baymard Institute asks US online shoppers the same question in wave after wave of survey work. You added it to the cart. You left without paying. Why. The answers barely move between waves, which is itself the finding.
- 48%extra costs too high: shipping, tax, fees at the last step
- 26%the site wanted an account
- 25%did not trust the site with card details
- 23%delivery was too slow
- 22%checkout too long or too complicated
- 21%could not see the total order cost up front
Recent Baymard survey waves, rounded. Figures drift a few points between waves, the order rarely changes. Browsers with no purchase intent are excluded.
Extra costs have led this ranking for over a decade. Shipping, taxes, and fees surface at the last step, after the shopper has mentally priced the item at the number on the product page. The fix is early disclosure, and it fights every commercial instinct to look cheap for one more screen.
The account requirement and the long checkout are the same complaint in different clothes. Both tell the shopper the store values its future marketing list over the sale happening right now. Guest checkout is one button. It converts.
Trust is the quiet entry. A quarter of abandoners did not want to hand over their card. Payment badges do little about it. Coherence does more. The checkout looks like the rest of the store, the payment page carries the same brand, and the total never jumps at the end.
One caution before applying any of this. The ranking averages all of US e-commerce. Your store's ranking is different, and the way to learn it is watching where your own checkouts die, step by step, source by source. The published list tells you what to suspect first, nothing more.