The average online checkout takes 5.1 steps to complete, from the cart page through order review, according to Baymard Institute’s ongoing checkout usability benchmark of top US and EU ecommerce sites. That number has held steady since Baymard first started measuring it in 2012. Speed has stopped being a nice-to-have for checkout design; it is now one of the clearest, most directly measurable levers a store owner has over conversion rate.
How many steps and fields does a typical checkout take?
A typical checkout runs 5.1 steps, counting from the cart page to the final order review, based on Baymard Institute’s benchmark of 344 top-grossing US and EU ecommerce sites, part of a research program that has logged more than 4,400 usability test sessions and 20,240 survey participants across 12 quantitative studies. That step count has stayed close to flat for over a decade, which suggests the bigger lever is not the number of pages a shopper clicks through, but what is on each page.
Form fields tell a different story. The average checkout in 2024 asked shoppers to fill in 11.3 form fields, down from 11.8 in 2021 and 12.7 in 2019. Baymard’s usability testing consistently finds that most stores do not need more than 8 fields in total, meaning the average checkout still carries roughly three fields more than necessary.
Figure 1: Average number of checkout form fields on benchmarked top ecommerce sites. Source: Baymard Institute checkout usability research.
Field count, not step count, is the number worth watching. A checkout can have five pages and still feel fast if each page asks for almost nothing.
Why do shoppers abandon checkout partway through?
Extra costs are the single biggest reason shoppers quit checkout, cited by 40% of US shoppers, according to Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research. Checkout being too long or complicated is the next most common friction point tied directly to the checkout flow itself, at 17%, roughly tied with site errors or crashes at 17% and just behind delivery being too slow at 20%. Distrust of the site with payment details sits close behind at 19%, which means four of the top five abandonment reasons trace back to how checkout is built and presented rather than to price alone.
These reasons are self-reported by shoppers who recently abandoned an order, and Baymard’s list is a rolling benchmark rather than a single dated survey, so treat the exact percentages as a current directional read rather than a one-time snapshot. What stands out is how much of the list a store actually controls: shipping costs can be disclosed earlier, trust signals can be added near the payment step, and account creation can be made optional, all without touching product pricing. For a full breakdown of abandonment rates by industry and channel, see our cart abandonment statistics for 2026.
Figure 2: Share of US shoppers citing each reason for abandoning checkout. Source: Baymard Institute cart abandonment research.
Cost surprises still cause the most drop-off, but the next three reasons, trust, forced accounts, and length, are all checkout design problems a store can fix without touching pricing.
Does checkout speed actually affect conversion rate?
Yes, and the effect is large enough to measure at the level of a tenth of a second. A joint Google and Deloitte study, “Milliseconds Make Millions,” analyzed 30 million mobile sessions across 37 retail, travel, and luxury brands in Europe and the US. For the retail segment specifically, 15 brands and 20.5 million sessions, a 0.1 second improvement in mobile page speed increased conversion rate by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. Travel saw an even bigger conversion lift at 10.1% for the same 0.1 second gain, though average order value moved far less, at 1.9%.
Figure 3: Conversion rate increase from a 0.1 second mobile speed improvement, by sector. Source: Google and Deloitte, “Milliseconds Make Millions” (2020).
This study is from 2020 and mobile networks and devices have moved on since, but no larger or more recent study has replaced it as the benchmark figure for speed-to-conversion, so treat the exact percentages as directional rather than current-year precise. Checkout speed is only one input into overall site conversion; see our ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks for 2026 for the fuller picture by device and traffic source.
How long do shoppers expect checkout to take?
Most shoppers have a fairly tight mental clock running during checkout. In Capterra’s 2022 survey of 770 US online shoppers who buy at least weekly, 66% said they expect checkout to take four minutes or less, and 28% expect it done in two minutes or less. The same survey found 43% of shoppers actively prefer a guest checkout option over creating an account.
Shopper patience is not evenly distributed across that four-minute window either. The closer a store gets to the two-minute mark, the smaller the share of shoppers still willing to wait, which is the practical reason every extra form field or confirmation screen costs more than it looks like on paper.
A checkout built around 5.1 steps and 8 to 11 form fields, the current benchmark range described above, comfortably fits inside most shoppers’ expectations, so the real risk is not the page count itself but any single slow or confusing step inside it. Keeping checkout terms and policies clear and easy to find with a proper terms and conditions page removes one common source of mid-checkout hesitation, where a shopper stops to go looking for return or payment terms that should have been visible already.
Does forced account creation slow checkout down?
Requiring an account before purchase is one of the clearest, most fixable sources of checkout friction. Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research puts required account creation at 18% of shoppers’ reasons for abandoning an order, and Capterra’s 2022 survey found 82% of consumers have abandoned a purchase specifically because the account registration process felt too complicated, with 49% saying it happens to them frequently. 36% of shoppers in the same survey said they would abandon a purchase outright if forced to create a new account.
Figure 4: How the account-creation decision point affects checkout friction. Source: synthesized from Baymard Institute and Capterra 2022 findings above.
Offering a genuine guest checkout path, with account creation optional and deferred until after purchase, removes an entire category of abandonment without touching pricing, shipping, or product pages at all.
Is one-click checkout actually faster, and how many stores use it?
One-click and accelerated checkout tools cut the 5.1-step, 11.3-field process down to a single tap for a returning shopper who has already saved their details. Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, processed 32% of all orders placed across Shopify stores during Black Friday-Cyber Monday 2025, up 39% year over year, according to Shopify’s own BFCM 2025 results announcement. That is roughly a third of holiday-weekend order volume skipping the standard multi-step, multi-field flow entirely.
Adoption growth of that size in a single peak shopping weekend suggests one-click checkout is no longer a niche feature reserved for the largest retailers. A shopper who has already stored a card and address with a wallet provider effectively collapses the 5.1-step flow into one confirmation tap, which is the fastest possible answer to the four-minute expectation window described above.
Figure 5: Where common checkout types fall on friction versus completion speed. Source: synthesized positioning from the benchmark and adoption data above.
The gap between a 5.1-step standard checkout and a one-click flow is exactly the gap that accelerated checkout tools are designed to close, and Shopify’s own order data shows shoppers taking that shortcut at scale whenever it is offered.
The checkout benchmark, at a glance
| Checkout metric | 2026 benchmark value | Baymard’s recommended optimal | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steps (cart to order review) | 5.1 steps | 3 to 4 steps | Baymard Institute checkout research |
| Form fields | 11.3 fields | 8 fields | Baymard Institute, 2024 data |
| Shoppers citing checkout as too long/complicated | 17% | n/a, root cause not field count alone | Baymard Institute cart abandonment research |
| Conversion lift per 0.1s mobile speed gain (retail) | 8.4% | n/a, marginal gain, not a fixed target | Google and Deloitte, 2020 |
| Cart abandonment reason | Share of shoppers citing it |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) | 40% |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% |
| Didn’t trust site with card details | 19% |
| Required account creation | 18% |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% |
Source: Baymard Institute cart abandonment research (rolling benchmark).
Laid out year by year, the pattern behind these two tables becomes easier to read: the step count has stayed essentially fixed since Baymard started measuring it, the field count has drifted down slowly rather than dropping in one redesign cycle, and the sharpest recent change has come from a completely different lever, one-click checkout adoption, rather than from any single store trimming its own form.
Figure 6: Key checkout benchmark data points over time. Sources: Baymard Institute, Shopify BFCM 2025 results.
The Bottom Line
Checkout speed comes down to two numbers that have proven stubbornly hard to move: 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields, against a recommended optimum closer to 3 to 4 steps and 8 fields. The gap between those two sets of numbers lines up almost exactly with the 17% of shoppers who say checkout felt too long or complicated, and it is the gap that one-click tools like Shop Pay are built to skip past entirely, at scale, for shoppers willing to hand over their details once. A store does not need to rebuild its whole checkout to close part of that gap. Cutting unnecessary fields, offering a real guest checkout path, and keeping terms and return policy information visible instead of buried are all changes that move the step and field count closer to what shoppers already expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many steps does the average online checkout take in 2026? The average checkout flow runs 5.1 steps from the cart page through order review, according to Baymard Institute’s ongoing benchmark of top US and EU ecommerce sites, a figure first tracked in 2012 and largely unchanged since.
How many form fields should a checkout have? Baymard Institute’s testing finds that most stores do not need more than 8 form fields, though the 2024 benchmark average across top sites was 11.3, down from 12.7 in 2019.
What percentage of shoppers abandon checkout because it takes too long? 17% of US online shoppers report abandoning an order because the checkout process felt too long or complicated, according to Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research, second only to unexpected extra costs at 40%.
Does a faster checkout actually increase conversion rate? Yes. A joint Google and Deloitte study of 20.5 million retail sessions found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile load speed increased conversion rate by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%.
Sources and References
- Baymard Institute. “E-Commerce Cart and Checkout Usability Research.” Ongoing benchmark of 344 top-grossing US and EU ecommerce sites, 4,400+ usability test sessions, 20,240 survey participants across 12 quantitative studies.
- Baymard Institute. (2024). “Checkout Optimization: Minimize Form Fields.” Average checkout step and form field counts, 2019-2024.
- Baymard Institute. “37 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics.” Rolling benchmark of reasons US shoppers abandon checkout.
- Deloitte and Google. (2020). “Milliseconds Make Millions.” Analysis of 30 million mobile sessions, 37 brands; retail segment covers 15 brands and 20.5 million sessions.
- Capterra. (2022). “Your Online Checkout Process Should Take 4 Minutes or Less.” Survey of 770 US online shoppers, conducted March 2022.
- Shopify. (2025). “Shopify Merchants Achieve Record-Breaking $14.6 Billion in Black Friday-Cyber Monday Sales.” Official BFCM 2025 results, including Shop Pay order share and year-over-year growth.
Note: All figures verified as of August 2026. The Google/Deloitte speed study is from 2020 and the Capterra survey from 2022; both are the most recent primary data available for those specific figures and are flagged in-text as directional rather than current-year precise. Baymard’s checkout benchmark and cart abandonment figures are refreshed on a rolling basis and this post’s headline figures are reviewed at least twice a year.
