Most merchants try standard fixes for cart abandonment: fewer steps, a mobile-friendly checkout, and more payment options at checkout. These changes help, but they don’t fully explain why shoppers still walk away.

WooCommerce and Stripe surveyed over 1,400 shoppers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific to learn what drives checkout decisions in 2026.

Failed transactions, not genuine declines, cause the most checkout-related abandonment at 28%. Network timeouts, routing errors, and missed retries — soft failures — create this loss. Checkout infrastructure that catches these failures can recover the lost revenue.

The research also shows how payment preferences shift sharply by region, cart size, product category, and shopper age. This reveals a checkout landscape far more contextual than most merchants plan for.

This report breaks down the results and what merchants can do about them.

Three out of four shoppers in our survey abandoned a cart.…