More sales from the traffic you already have
Shopify shows you 'abandoned checkouts' and owners read it as the whole story. It is the small, visible end of a much larger leak, and the two leaks need completely different repairs.
There is a page in the Shopify admin that quietly miseducates store owners, and it is the abandoned checkouts list. An owner opens it, sees forty names, forty almost-customers with products chosen and emails typed, and concludes this is where the store loses its money. Then they buy a recovery email app, recover three orders, and consider the leak handled.
The list is real and the recovered orders are real. The miseducation is about scale. The abandoned checkouts you can see are the small, well lit end of a much larger loss, most of which happens where Shopify has no name and no email to show you. This entry is about telling the two leaks apart, because they are different sizes and they need different repairs.
The definitions first, because the confusion starts there. An abandoned cart is any session where a visitor added a product to the cart and no order followed. An abandoned checkout is the much narrower event Shopify can actually itemize for you: the visitor went to checkout and got far enough to enter contact information before leaving. Every abandoned checkout was an abandoned cart, but the reverse is nowhere near true. The person who added to cart and closed the tab, the one who reached the checkout and bounced off the shipping price without typing anything, none of them appear on that admin page. They are anonymous losses, and they are the majority.
The published scale of the whole leak: Baymard Institute maintains a running average across 50 different studies of cart abandonment, and it currently stands at 70.22%. Seven of every ten carts, across the industry, die before payment. Meanwhile Littledata’s Shopify benchmark measures the visible end: of visitors who begin checkout, the average completion rate is 45%.
Before assigning blame, subtract the weather. Baymard’s survey found that 43% of US online shoppers had abandoned a cart simply because they were just browsing, not ready to buy. Carts are used as wishlists, comparison trays, and price calculators, and no checkout improvement will convert a person who was never shopping today. Some of them come back on their own. This share is why chasing a zero abandonment rate is a fantasy, and why I never let an owner treat 70% as a report card.
The diagnosis begins with the remainder, because when Baymard set the just browsing crowd aside, the reasons left were mostly things a store does to itself: 39% extra costs too high, 21% delivery too slow, 19% did not trust the site with card details, 19% forced account creation, 18% a checkout too long or complicated, 15% unsatisfactory returns policy, 14% could not see the total cost up front.
The anonymous majority of your losses happen between add to cart and the checkout’s first field, and the repairs live in that corridor. This is where the 39% cost objection does its damage: the cart is where shipping suspicion peaks, so the corridor must answer the cost question before the checkout asks for anything. Shipping price or threshold stated in the cart. Delivery time stated in the cart. No coupon field so prominent that it sends people off to hunt for codes and never return.
Walk it yourself on a phone: add a product, open the cart, and count everything between you and the first checkout field that could raise an eyebrow. You cannot email these people, which is exactly why the corridor has to work the first time.
The abandoned checkouts list is the slice you can study individually, and it deserves better analysis than most owners give it. Look at where the checkouts actually stall. Piles of abandonment at the shipping step usually mean the price or the delay disappointed. Stalls at the payment step point at trust or missing payment methods. And if people abandon immediately on the first page, count your form fields, because Baymard’s benchmark says the average checkout shows 23.48 form elements where 12 to 14 would do.
Recovery emails belong here too, with their honest job description. They reach only the slice that typed an email first, and they cannot fix the reason someone left, they can only remind. I send them, I just refuse to call them a repair.
The abandoned checkouts page is a symptom log, not the disease. Reading it without walking the cart corridor is like counting the buckets under a leak and never looking at the roof.
If you do one thing after reading this, split your leak in two numbers you track separately: what share of carts ever reach checkout, and what share of checkouts complete against the 45% average. The first number diagnoses your cart corridor, the second your checkout itself. Baymard’s estimate for what better checkout design alone is worth across large sites, a possible 35.26% lift in conversion, is the ceiling that makes this unglamorous accounting worthwhile. The store you have already paid to fill with visitors is holding recoverable money in both rooms. You just need to know which room you are standing in before you start fixing.
An abandoned cart is any session where a product was added to the cart and no order followed. An abandoned checkout is the narrower slice Shopify can show you by name: the visitor got as far as entering contact details in the checkout before leaving. Everyone in the second group is in the first, but most of the first group never appears in your abandoned checkouts list.
Baymard's running average across 50 published studies is 70.22%. A big share of that is unavoidable browsing behavior, Baymard found 43% of US shoppers abandon because they were not ready to buy, so do not chase zero. Chase the self inflicted reasons: surprise costs, forced accounts, long forms, missing trust.
They recover some orders and you should send them, but they only reach the small slice of abandoners who typed in an email before leaving. A recovery email cannot fix why the person left, so I treat recovery flows as a bandage and the checkout walk through as the actual repair.
First check whether it is actually high: with Littledata's average Shopify checkout completion at 45%, half of checkouts dying is sadly normal. If you are well below that, walk your own checkout on a phone and look for the classic causes in Baymard's data: extra costs revealed late, forced account creation, too many fields, and thin trust signals at the payment step.