Cart Abandonment and Checkout in Switzerland: Why Shoppers Quit

Cart abandonment is a topic where it's easy to confuse two very different things: a cart that was never meant to be finished in that session, and a cart a shopper genuinely wanted to buy from — and abandoned partway through checkout. This article uses the most widely cited large-scale checkout-abandonment research — the Baymard Institute's — to separate the two, flags clearly where the data is US-only, and adds what's genuinely Swiss: Eurostat's problem-rate comparison, TWINT as the local payment method to place next to the express-checkout buttons, and the consent rule a Swiss shop has to respect before sending a cart reminder.

How Much Cart Abandonment Really Happens

The Baymard Institute publishes a figure that puts the cart-abandonment rate at 70.22% — an "average calculated based on 50 different studies containing statistics on ecommerce shopping cart abandonment", drawing on studies from MarketingSherpa 2006 (59.80%) to Uptain 2025 (71.72%) (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, "Last updated: September 22, 2025", read 2026-10-01). That's an average across different vendors, years and methodologies — not a single Baymard measurement, and not a Swiss one either; no comparable Swiss aggregate of this kind was found. A separate Baymard page gives a different number for a related but not identical measurement: "70.19%", "tracked ... for 14 years" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability). Cite one of the two with its own number — don't average them.

What the number doesn't say is more useful than the number itself. In Baymard's own survey of US shoppers about why they abandon a cart, the top answer — ahead of every other reason — isn't abandonment of a transaction in the usual sense: 42% said "I was just browsing / not ready to buy". A meaningful share of that 70% isn't lost revenue — it's a cart used as a shopping list or a price comparison tool, with no intention of buying in that session. What a checkout's design can actually influence is what happens to shoppers who have already started checkout and still don't finish. The next section — the rest of Baymard's survey — answers exactly that question.

Why Shoppers Abandon at Checkout

After filtering out "just browsing", Baymard's survey gives the full list of reasons US online shoppers abandoned a cart:

Source: baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, read 2026-10-01. The caveat to keep with this table: no published sample size or fieldwork date, and the survey covers US online shoppers only — treat it as an order of magnitude, not a Swiss benchmark.

A national satisfaction panel will sometimes ask shoppers why they stopped buying from a store, rather than why they abandoned a cart mid-checkout. The two measure different things and shouldn't be combined into one number; no such survey for Switzerland was confirmed for this article.

Eurostat's isoc_ec_iprb21 series, covering problems reported by people who bought online in the last three months, puts Switzerland at 10.65% reporting at least one problem in 2025, against the EU27 average of 35.43% — 5.66% cited delivery slower than indicated (EU27: 19.92%), and 4.24% cited a website that was difficult to use or didn't work properly (EU27: 11.49%) (ec.europa.eu/eurostat, geo=CH, read 2026-10-01). Swiss online shoppers report far fewer problems than the EU average on every row measured here — that's a genuinely different market, not a rounding difference, though it's a different question again from why a shopper abandons a cart mid-checkout.

Costs Visible Earlier

The single most common reason for abandonment in the Baymard table is extra costs — 40% of respondents; separately, 12% couldn't see or calculate the full order cost up front. Cost is also something a shop can show a customer before they reach the final step: delivery cost, payment-method surcharges, any applicable tax. The mechanics of delivery cost and the fees charged by specific Swiss payment methods and gateways — the actual numbers you'd put in the cart so nothing "appears" on the last screen — are covered separately in our online payment methods and payment gateway fees articles; what this section shows is only where that problem sits in checkout, not the fee list itself.

Guest Checkout

Forced account creation is the fourth most common reason for checkout abandonment in the Baymard table — 18% of respondents. The institute doesn't publish what share of stores actually force registration, so no "X% of stores force an account" figure appears here — but the mechanism is clear from the reasons table alone: guest checkout removes one of the four most commonly cited reasons for abandonment without changing anything else in the flow. An account can be offered after the purchase completes, once the customer has already had a successful buying experience.

Shorter Forms, Autofill, Express Checkout and TWINT

Checkout length is a separate parameter Baymard measures — and here, too, two pages from the same institute report different numbers on different bases. The cart-abandonment statistics page says "an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12-14 form elements (7-8 if only counting the form fields)", and "the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements ... (14.88 if only counting the form fields)" (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate). A separate blog post from 26 June 2024 gives a different, more recent figure: "the average checkout flow in 2024 is 5.1 steps long and contains 11.3 form fields" — down from 11.8 in 2021 and 12.7 in 2019 (baymard.com/blog/checkout-flow-average-form-fields). These two numbers (14.88 and 11.3) aren't the same measurement on the same basis — cite one, don't average them.

Browser address and contact autofill doesn't need any integration work on the shop's side — correctly labelled form fields are enough for the customer's browser to recognise and fill them in automatically. It's one of the simplest changes that shortens checkout without removing a field.

Express checkout goes further — it skips the address form entirely. Stripe describes its Express Checkout Element as "integration for accepting payments through one-click payment method buttons", covering Link, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna and Amazon Pay (docs.stripe.com/elements/express-checkout-element); setting shippingAddressRequired: true and passing a list of shipping rates has the wallet supply the shipping address instead of a typed form (docs.stripe.com/elements/express-checkout-element/accept-a-payment). Shopify works similarly through accelerated checkout buttons — "when a customer clicks an unbranded button, they skip the cart and go to the Shopify Checkout" — with Shop Pay saving customers' "email address, payment method, and shipping and billing information" (help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/dynamic-checkout, help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shop-pay).

In Switzerland, the local method to offer alongside these buttons is TWINT — but it works differently from an address-filling wallet. On a computer, the customer scans a QR code shown on the checkout page with the TWINT app; on a phone, they are passed to the TWINT app to approve the payment and then returned to the shop (docs.stripe.com/payments/twint, read 2026-10-01). What TWINT removes is typing card details, not the address form, and Stripe's Express Checkout Element doesn't support it (same page), so it belongs in the regular payment step. Stripe Switzerland prices TWINT at 1.9% + CHF 0.30 per transaction (stripe.com/ch/pricing/local-payment-methods, read 2026-10-01). PostFinance's Checkout E-Com Bundle charges 1.3% (min. CHF 0.20) for TWINT, plus a PSP processing fee of CHF 0.18 per transaction and a basic fee of CHF 19.90 a month; PostFinance positions the bundle for shops with annual revenue of CHF 200,000 or more (postfinance.ch/en/business/products/payment-collection/online-shop.html, read 2026-10-01). TWINT isn't on by default: with Stripe you enable it in the Dashboard, and the capability stays pending until TWINT's onboarding requirements are verified — among them a legal notice with the company name, full address and contact details, and prices shown in CHF at the latest during checkout (docs.stripe.com/payments/twint).

Checkout Benchmark: 65% / 35% / 2%

Baymard assessed the checkout flow of 343 top-grossing US and EU e-commerce sites and reports the distribution: "65% of sites have a performance of 'mediocre' or worse, 35% of sites feature a 'decent' or better checkout flow, and only 2% are 'good'" — none of the sites assessed reached "perfect" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability, read 2026-10-01). This is the institute's own classification against more than 110 guidelines and over 30,000 scored checkout elements — not an independent market audit, and with no Swiss breakdown, but a reference point: "the average site has 32 unique improvements to perform in their checkout flow".

Cart Abandonment Reminders

The mechanism is straightforward: a shop records that a customer added products to a cart and left without completing the order, then sends a reminder — by email or SMS — listing the products left behind. The technical precondition is knowing the customer's email address before they leave the site; without that, there's nowhere for the reminder to go.

The legal side has a Swiss source of its own. Under the Federal Act on Unfair Competition (UWG; "UCA" in the official English translation), Art. 3(1)(o), a business acts unfairly if it sends "mass advertising without direct connection with any requested content by telecommunication" and fails "to obtain the prior consent of the customer, or to indicate the correct sender or a simple and free of charge option of refusal" (fedlex.admin.ch, SR 241, version in force from 1 January 2025, read 2026-10-01; the English text is an unofficial translation). The same letter carries an exception: a business that received a customer's contact details "when selling goods, works or services", and indicated the option of refusal at that point, may send that customer advertising for its own similar goods, works or services without consent. Whether an automated cart reminder counts as mass advertising, and whether an unpaid cart counts as a sale, is a legal judgement call. Treat a promotional reminder as advertising that needs prior consent unless the exception clearly applies, and confirm the setup with a Swiss lawyer before switching on an automated flow.

Measuring: The Checkout Funnel in GA4

Google Analytics 4 defines a standard set of ecommerce events that together describe the path from cart to purchase: add_to_cart, view_cart, begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase (developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/reference/events, read 2026-10-01). The documentation describes the three middle checkout events unambiguously: "begin_checkout — This event signifies that a user has begun a checkout", "add_shipping_info — This event signifies a user has submitted their shipping information in an ecommerce checkout process", "add_payment_info — This event signifies a user has submitted their payment information in an ecommerce checkout process" (same page). The GA4 ecommerce guide presents these as a sequence to implement step by step: send begin_checkout to measure the first step, add_shipping_info once shipping is submitted, and add_payment_info once payment details are submitted (developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/ecommerce, read 2026-10-01).

To see exactly which step shoppers abandon at, GA4 has a built-in funnel exploration report: choose the funnel exploration template and define each step as an event — begin_checkout → add_shipping_info → add_payment_info → purchase — and GA4 shows what share of users move from one step to the next, and what share drop off at each (support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974, read 2026-10-01). One limit worth knowing: funnel steps are defined by event-and-dimension conditions, not by metrics — the documentation states: "You can't define funnel steps based on metrics".

Checkout Checklist

Pulling the above into one list to run against your own checkout:

• Delivery cost and every extra fee are visible in the cart, before the customer reaches the final payment step.
• Guest checkout is available — account registration is an option, not a requirement.
• The checkout form collects only the data needed to fulfil the order, and fields have correctly labelled attributes so the browser can autofill them.
• Express-checkout buttons (Apple Pay, Google Pay and similar) are visible at the start of checkout, not only on the last screen, and TWINT is offered in the payment step if your provider supports it.
• Cart-abandonment reminders have a legal basis checked with a Swiss lawyer (UWG Art. 3(1)(o): prior consent, or the narrow existing-customer exception with an opt-out) — the safe default is prior consent.
• The checkout funnel is measured, not guessed — you know exactly which step shoppers abandon most often.

If you'd rather work through checkout alongside a full UX checklist for the whole store — not just this one stage — use our UX checklist for your store; this article is part of our wider e-commerce UX section, where checkout is only one of the places a store loses customers.

Sources

Baymard Institute — cart abandonment rate

Baymard Institute — checkout usability

Baymard Institute — average checkout form fields

Stripe — Express Checkout Element

Stripe Switzerland — local payment methods, TWINT

Stripe — TWINT payments

PostFinance Checkout — online shop pricing

Shopify Help — dynamic checkout buttons

Shopify Help — Shop Pay

Eurostat — isoc_ec_iprb21, problems buying online

GA4 — ecommerce events reference

GA4 — funnel exploration reports

Federal Act on Unfair Competition (UWG), SR 241