More sales from the traffic you already have
Merchants keep assuming forced account creation is a minor speed bump while the published abandonment and form-length data says checkout friction of this kind sits inside a $260 billion recoverable pile, so the usual answer misleads by treating account walls as neutral.
Most merchants treat “should I force an account before checkout” as a design preference, something to A/B test later and not worry about now. The published data says otherwise. Checkout usability issues alone are tied to $260 billion in recoverable orders, and the average cart abandonment rate across collected surveys sits at 70.22%, with individual studies ranging as high as 79.53%. Every extra field or forced step, including account creation, competes for space inside a checkout that already averages 11.3 form fields and already loses 17% of shoppers who call it too complex.
Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment dataset does not report a single figure. It reports an average of 70.22% pulled from multiple studies, and the individual studies underneath that average spread from 68.70% (Fresh Relevance) up to 79.53% (SalesCycle 2023), with Uptain’s 2025 figure at 71.72% and another cited figure at 79.30%. That spread matters for the account-versus-guest question because it shows abandonment is already high and already variable before anyone adds a registration wall. A merchant comparing their own checkout to “the industry average” should know there isn’t one clean average, there’s a band, and 70.22% is the midpoint of collected data rather than a fixed target.
| Source | Abandonment rate |
|---|---|
| Uptain 2025 | 71.72% |
| SalesCycle 2023 | 79.53% |
| Fresh Relevance | 68.70% |
| Additional cited figure | 79.30% |
| Average across collected studies | 70.22% |
Baymard’s checkout form field research puts the average checkout at 11.3 fields, and separately reports that 17% of users have abandoned a purchase due to checkout complexity. These two facts sit next to each other in the same research and they explain why forced account creation is not a neutral addition. It is not that account fields are uniquely harmful, it is that the checkout form field budget is already at 11.3 on average, and complexity is already named as a reason people leave. Adding fields for password creation, account confirmation, or mandatory profile data pushes a checkout further from that average rather than toward it.
Baymard’s own framing of the $260 billion figure is specific: it is what’s recoverable “if we focus only on checkout usability issues,” and it corresponds to a 35.26% increase in conversion rate from better checkout flow. This is not a guest-checkout number specifically, and it should not be reported as one. But it is a usability number, and account walls are a usability decision, so the connection is direct even without a dedicated study isolating guest checkout. A merchant deciding whether to gate checkout behind registration is making exactly the kind of usability choice this $260 billion figure is scoped to.
Baymard’s UX benchmark shows the top-scoring omnichannel checkout usability in the Luxury Goods Marketplace category sitting at a rank of 1%, meaning even the best performers are measured against a scored benchmark rather than treated as a finished, uncontested category. That detail matters because it shows the account-versus-guest debate does not disappear once a merchant reaches strong performance. The benchmark keeps scoring at the top end, which means the underlying question, does this step help or hurt completion, stays open even for stores already doing well.
The abandonment and form field figures come from Baymard Institute’s published cart abandonment rate statistics and checkout flow form field research, both read as loaded on September 8, 2026. A merchant weighing guest checkout against forced accounts should treat 11.3 fields as the current market baseline and ask whether registration fields push past it, and should read the 70.22% average abandonment rate as a floor to beat rather than a number to accept.
The published abandonment figures do not isolate account-creation-only cases, but they do show abandonment rates ranging from 68.70% to 79.53% across separate surveys, with an average of 70.22%. Checkout complexity is named directly as a cause: 17% of users say they have abandoned because the checkout was too complex. An account wall adds steps to an already long form, and Baymard's benchmark counts an average of 11.3 form fields in checkout, so any added requirement pushes further past that baseline.
Baymard Institute's research puts the average checkout form field count at 11.3, and reports that 17% of shoppers have abandoned due to checkout complexity. There is no published threshold beyond that average in the given data, so a merchant should treat 11.3 as the current market norm and any addition, including forced registration, as a deviation from it rather than a proven improvement.
No. The figures cited by Baymard Institute vary by source and year: 71.72% from Uptain 2025, 79.53% from SalesCycle 2023, 68.70% from Fresh Relevance, and 79.30% in another cited figure. The average across all collected data comes out to 70.22%, which is the number to treat as the reference point rather than any single survey.
Baymard Institute states that $260 billion in orders is recoverable if the focus stays only on checkout usability issues, tied to a 35.26% increase in conversion rate from a better checkout flow. This is presented as a usability-fix estimate, not a guest-checkout-specific number, but checkout usability is exactly the category that account walls and long forms fall into.
Baymard's UX benchmark lists a top omnichannel checkout usability score at 1% for the Luxury Goods Marketplace category, showing that even the best-performing checkouts sit inside a scored, competitive benchmark rather than being treated as finished. That leaves room for account-versus-guest decisions to still matter at the top end of the market, not only for average performers.