More sales from the traffic you already have
Merchants assume a shorter checkout is a nicer checkout, but the number that actually predicts abandonment is the field count itself, and most stores never measure their own.
Most merchants think a shorter checkout is a matter of taste, something you tighten up when the design team has time. Baymard’s numbers say otherwise: checkout length and checkout structure are measured, tracked, and tied directly to abandonment, and the average store is carrying more fields than the benchmark suggests it needs. The gap between what a checkout asks for and what it actually requires is where a lot of the $260 billion Baymard says is recoverable through checkout usability improvements sits.
Baymard’s checkout form fields research puts the average number of fields at 11.3 across the checkouts it studied. That number matters because Baymard also found that 17% of users have abandoned a purchase specifically because the checkout felt too complex. Complexity here is not an abstract feeling, it is a countable thing: field count. A checkout with noticeably more than 11.3 fields is above the average that Baymard itself uses as a reference point, and every field beyond what is needed to ship and charge the order is a candidate for the abandonment figure to apply to.
Inside that field-count research, Baymard singled out one pattern by name: 89% of checkouts do not use a single combined name field, and instead split first name and last name into two separate boxes. Baymard’s usability testing observed that users generally think of their name as one piece of information, not two, so the split is a structural mismatch between how the form is built and how people actually fill it in. Fixing this one item does not require touching shipping logic, payment integration, or address validation. It is a direct, one-field reduction toward the 11.3 average, and it is the first specific line item Baymard names in its own list of checkout fixes.
Baymard’s pooled average across the abandonment studies it tracks comes out to 70.22%. But that average sits on top of individual studies that disagree with each other by more than ten percentage points. Fresh Relevance’s 2022 study measured 68.70%, near the low end. SalesCycle’s 2023 study measured 79.53%, near the high end. Uptain’s 2025 study landed at 71.72%, close to the pooled average. The table below lines these up.
| Study | Year | Abandonment rate |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh Relevance | 2022 | 68.70% |
| SalesCycle | 2023 | 79.53% |
| Uptain | 2025 | 71.72% |
| Baymard pooled average | — | 70.22% |
The spread means a merchant reading a single abandonment statistic in isolation, without knowing which study produced it or when, is working with a number that could be off by ten points or more from what a different study measured in a different year. The pooled 70.22% is a reasonable anchor precisely because it averages across that spread rather than picking one study’s year and methodology.
Baymard’s headline figure on this topic is that $260 billion in otherwise lost orders is recoverable if the focus stays specifically on checkout usability issues, translating to a 35.26% increase in conversion rate from a better checkout flow alone. Form field count and the name field split sit inside that broader checkout usability category rather than accounting for the full $260 billion by themselves. The point is not that fewer fields alone unlocks that figure, it is that field count is one of the concretely measured levers inside the same category Baymard is pricing at $260 billion.
The abandonment figures above come from Baymard’s cart abandonment rate page as loaded on September 8, 2026, which itself aggregates individual studies published between 2022 and 2025, and the field count and name field figures come from Baymard’s separate checkout form fields research page loaded the same day.
If you run a store, count the fields on your own checkout page today and compare that count against the 11.3 average, then check specifically whether your form still splits name into two boxes the way 89% of checkouts do. Those two checks cost nothing and point directly at the same category of fix Baymard ties to the 17% complexity-driven abandonment figure and the $260 billion recoverable revenue estimate.
Baymard's research puts the average checkout at 11.3 form fields, which is the baseline most stores are measured against. There is no single correct target given in the data, but the 17% abandonment figure tied to checkout complexity means every field above the minimum needed to ship and bill an order is a candidate for removal. The practical move is to count the fields on your own checkout page and compare that number against 11.3, since a page sitting well above that average is carrying fields nobody has justified recently.
No. Baymard's own pooled average across the studies it tracks is 70.22%, but the individual studies underneath that average range from 68.70% (Fresh Relevance, 2022) up to 79.53% (SalesCycle, 2023), with Uptain's 2025 figure at 71.72%. That spread of more than ten percentage points between studies means a single abandonment number quoted without its source is close to meaningless for benchmarking your own store.
Combining first name and last name into one name field, since Baymard found that 89% of checkouts still split it into two fields despite users generally treating name as one piece of information during usability testing. It is a small change relative to redesigning the whole flow, and it directly reduces the field count toward the 11.3 average without touching payment or shipping logic.
Baymard's figure is that $260 billion in otherwise lost orders is recoverable through better checkout usability alone, tied to a 35.26% increase in conversion rate from checkout flow improvements. Form field count is one lever inside that broader checkout usability category, alongside things like the name field split, so cutting fields is not the whole $260 billion story but it sits inside the same bucket of fixes Baymard is measuring.
Because they are measuring different populations of stores over different years with different methodologies, which is exactly why the range runs from 68.70% up to 79.53% across the studies Baymard aggregates. Treat any single abandonment percentage as one data point from one study rather than a universal truth, and use the pooled 70.22% average only as a rough anchor rather than a target.