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Statistics and data

Shopify shipping and checkout statistics (2026)

Last updated 27 October 2026.

Numbers on cart abandonment, shipping costs, delivery speed, international orders, and the limits Shopify and the main carriers put on shipping rates. Every figure links to the page it comes from, and every source was read on 20 October 2026. The first section is our own data, from a test of 241 Shopify stores' checkouts.

Original data: our 2026 store study

In October 2026 we created a cart for one in-stock product, as an anonymous buyer, on 241 public Shopify stores, and read the delivery options offered in up to eight of the countries each store ships to. Full method and limits are in the study.

• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 49 of 241 Shopify stores tested (20.3%) had at least one country they ship to where a cart for an in-stock product got no delivery option at all, confirmed with live carrier rates. This is a lower bound, because live rates were read for at most 2 countries per store.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 115 of 241 Shopify stores tested (47.7%) had at least one country with no fixed delivery option, the upper bound: such a country either relies only on live rates or has no option at all.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 76 of 199 countries read with live carrier rates after showing no fixed rate (38.2%) still got no delivery option.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), a store's home country rarely failed: 1 of 44 home countries read with live rates (2.3%) got no delivery option.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 72 of 241 Shopify stores tested (29.9%) offered fixed rates in some tested countries and none in others.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), the 241 stores tested declare a median of 60 ship-to countries, and 111 of them (46.1%) declare more than 100.
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 52 of 194 stores (26.8%) offered a free delivery option for the tested product to their home country.

Sample: well-known example stores from 17 public lists, likely better maintained than average, so these figures probably understate the problem. Data collected 20 to 22 October 2026.

Delivery prices from the same tests are on Shopify shipping prices by country (2026): in our 2026 test of 241 Shopify stores, the cheapest option to a US address had a median of 5.99 USD from US-based stores (n = 80 carts) and 16.50 USD from stores based abroad (n = 30), and 129 of 877 carts with fixed rates (14.7%) included a free option.

Key statistics

• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 49 of 241 Shopify stores tested (20.3%) had at least one country where a cart for an in-stock product got no delivery option at all, confirmed with live carrier rates; the upper bound is 115 of 241 (47.7%).
• According to ShipRateGuard (2026), 76 of 199 countries read with live carrier rates after showing no fixed rate (38.2%) still got no delivery option.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, calculated from 50 studies.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), 40% of US online shoppers who abandoned a checkout, leaving aside those who were “just browsing”, did so because extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) were too high.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), 20% of US online shoppers who abandoned a checkout, leaving aside those who were “just browsing”, did so because delivery was too slow.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), 67% of online shoppers have abandoned a cart because of the delivery offering, in a survey of 29,000 shoppers in 29 countries.
• According to Eurostat (2026), delivery slower than expected was the problem EU online shoppers reported most often in 2025, cited by 20% of them.
• According to Baymard Institute (2023), 41% of e-commerce sites in its benchmark do not show an estimated delivery date in the shipping-selection step.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), a carrier or app that calculates rates at checkout has at most 10 seconds to respond, and as little as 3 seconds for high-traffic shop-app pairs.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), Shopify does not retry a carrier rate request: a timeout or error triggers backup rates.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), third-party carrier-calculated shipping is included only on the Advanced and Plus plans, is a paid add-on or annual-billing feature on Grow, and is not available on other plans.
• According to the US Census Bureau (2026), e-commerce accounted for 17.1% of total US retail sales in the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), 70% of online shoppers buy internationally, up from 60% in its 2025 survey.

Cart abandonment statistics

• According to Baymard Institute (2025), the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22%.
• Baymard Institute (2025) calculates that average from 50 studies published between 2006 and 2025, listed on its cart abandonment page, which was last updated on 22 September 2025.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing / not ready to buy”.
• Baymard Institute (2025) reports that, leaving aside the “just browsing” group, the reasons US online shoppers gave for abandoning a checkout were as follows (source):
  • Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees): 40%.
  • Delivery was too slow: 20%.
  • Did not trust the site with credit card information: 19%.
  • The site wanted me to create an account: 18%.
  • Too long or complicated checkout process: 17%.
  • Website had errors or crashed: 17%.
  • Returns policy was not satisfactory: 13%.
  • Could not see or calculate the total order cost up front: 12%.
  • The credit card was declined: 10%.
  • Not enough payment methods: 9%.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), the average large e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), the average US checkout flow shows 23.48 form elements by default, while an ideal checkout can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), only a quarter of online shoppers say they never abandon their carts.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), 67% of online shoppers have abandoned a cart because of the delivery offering, and 52% of e-commerce businesses see the same reason for drop-off.
• According to DHL Group (2026), 62% of online shoppers say they will immediately abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method is unavailable, while only 45% of businesses recognise this as a key driver of cart abandonment.
• DHL eCommerce (2026) surveyed 29,000 online shoppers in 29 countries (1,000 per country) and 5,800 e-commerce businesses in 28 countries, between 15 December 2025 and 11 February 2026 (methodology).

Shipping cost statistics

• According to Baymard Institute (2025), extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees are the most common reason US online shoppers abandon a checkout, cited by 40% of those not “just browsing”.
• According to Baymard Institute (2025), 12% of US online shoppers who abandoned a checkout, leaving aside those “just browsing”, did so because they could not see or calculate the total order cost up front.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), free shipping is the number one reason that would encourage online shoppers to complete a purchase.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 5% of people in the EU who bought online in 2025 reported costs higher than indicated.
• According to Australia Post (2026), the average online basket in Australia shrank to A$96 in 2025, citing CommBank iQ data.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), price-based shipping rates are matched against the cart value after discounts and before taxes, so a discount code can move a cart to a different rate.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), Shopify stores weights in whole grams and rounds converted values up, so a product entered as 0.03 lb is stored as 14 g.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), when no weight-based rate matches a cart and no other rate applies, Shopify uses the next highest weight-based rate so the customer can still check out.

Delivery speed statistics

• According to Baymard Institute (2025), 20% of US online shoppers who abandoned a checkout, leaving aside those “just browsing”, did so because delivery was too slow.
• According to Baymard Institute (2023), 41% of e-commerce sites in its benchmark do not provide an estimated delivery date within the shipping-selection interface.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 20% of people in the EU who bought online in 2025 reported delivery slower than expected, the most often reported problem.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 63% of people in the EU who bought online in 2025 reported no problem when purchasing online.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 10% of people in the EU who bought online in 2025 received a wrong or damaged good.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 12% of people in the EU who bought online in 2025 found a website difficult to use or not working satisfactorily.
• According to DHL Group (2026), 20% of online shoppers say faster delivery would encourage them to complete their purchase.
• According to DHL Group (2026), three in ten online shoppers now look to out-of-home delivery locations such as pickup points.

International shipping statistics

• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), 70% of online shoppers buy internationally, up from 60% in 2025.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), 45% of online shoppers buy across borders more than once a month.
• According to DHL eCommerce (2026), over 3 in 10 orders of the e-commerce businesses it surveyed are sent internationally.
• According to Eurostat (2026), 78% of internet users aged 16 to 74 in the EU bought or ordered goods or services online in 2025, up from 62% in 2015.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), a Shopify store can only sell to a country that is included in an active market.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), since 28 August 2025 shipments sent with Canada Post from Canada to the US must be sent as DDP (Delivered Duties Paid).
• According to Australia Post (2026), the maximum weight for a parcel sent overseas is 20 kg, against 22 kg within Australia.

E-commerce market statistics: US, UK and Australia

• According to the US Census Bureau (2026), US retail e-commerce sales were $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted.
• According to the US Census Bureau (2026), e-commerce accounted for 17.1% of total US retail sales in the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted.
• According to the US Census Bureau (2026), US e-commerce sales rose 12.2% from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, while total retail sales rose 6.7%. The Census Bureau notes these estimates will be revised in its 19 November 2026 release.
• According to the Office for National Statistics (2026), internet sales were 27.3% of total retail sales in Great Britain in August 2026.
• According to the Office for National Statistics (2026), the internet share of retail sales in Great Britain peaked at 32.4% in November 2025.
• According to Australia Post (2026), Australians spent A$82.6 billion online in 2025, up 14% on 2024.
• According to Australia Post (2026), 24% of all Australian retail spending was made online in 2025, citing CommBank iQ data.
• According to Australia Post (2026), 82% of Australian households, or 9.8 million, shopped online in 2025, and 41% of them shopped online at least fortnightly.
• According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index (2026), US parcel volume reached 23.1 billion shipments in 2025, up 3.3% year over year.
• According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index (2026), US parcel volume is projected to reach 31 billion by 2031.
• According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index (2026), Amazon Logistics became the largest US parcel carrier by volume in 2025, with 6.9 billion parcels.

Shopify shipping facts and limits

• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), a store can create up to 99 custom shipping profiles in addition to its general shipping profile.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), a store can activate a maximum of 25 delivery customization functions, the app logic that can hide, reorder or add messages to delivery options at checkout.
• According to Shopify's pricing page (2026), the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans include 10 inventory locations, and Plus includes 200.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), merchants can buy shipping labels through Shopify's carrier accounts from fulfillment locations in 10 countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), Shopify-powered backup rates use a built-in carrier in six countries: USPS in the US, Canada Post in Canada, Evri in the UK, Chronopost in France, Poste Italiane in Italy and Correos in Spain.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), a product with no weight is given a weight of 0 when Shopify works out its backup shipping rates.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), an abandoned checkout keeps the shipping rates from when it was created, so testing with it does not reflect current settings.
• According to Shopify (2026), its checkout powers 12% of US e-commerce; this is Shopify's own figure.
• According to Shopify (2026), its overall conversion rate is on average 15% higher than competing platforms, and up to 36% higher, based on a study it completed in April 2023 with a “Big Three” global management consulting company; this is Shopify's own claim.

Carrier-calculated rate statistics

Carrier-calculated rates are the live prices a carrier account or a shipping app returns at checkout. These are Shopify's documented limits for them.

Source: Shopify developer documentation, DeliveryCarrierService (2026). Shopify says these are upper limits and may change outside its normal API versioning.

• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), the time a carrier or app has to return rates is 10 seconds under 1,500 requests per minute, 5 seconds from 1,500 to 3,000, and 3 seconds above 3,000.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), there is no retry: the rate response must succeed on the first try, and timeouts or errors trigger backup rates.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), Shopify caches returned carrier rates for 15 minutes, and for only 30 seconds after an error.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), third-party carrier-calculated shipping is included on the Shopify Advanced and Shopify Plus plans.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), Shopify Grow stores can add third-party carrier-calculated shipping for an extra monthly fee or get it with annual billing, and all other plans cannot use it.
• According to Shopify's developer documentation (2026), if a store changes plan and no longer meets the requirements, its connection to a carrier service is deactivated.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), merchants can connect their own accounts from five carriers to show calculated rates: UPS and FedEx for locations worldwide, USPS for US locations, Canada Post for Canadian locations and Australia Post for Australian locations.
• According to the Shopify Help Center (2026), backup shipping rates are shown only when all app or carrier-calculated rates for a shipment fail and no other eligible shipping rate is available.

Carrier parcel size and weight limits

A cart heavier or larger than a carrier service allows gets no rate from that service. Limits as each carrier publishes them:

• According to USPS (2026), the maximum weight for USPS Ground Advantage is 70 lb and the maximum combined length and girth is 130 inches.
• According to Royal Mail (2026), a UK Small Parcel can measure up to 45 × 35 × 16 cm and weigh up to 2 kg.
• According to Royal Mail (2026), a UK Medium Parcel can measure up to 61 × 46 × 46 cm and weigh up to 20 kg.
• According to Royal Mail (2026), heavier items go through Parcelforce, up to 30 kg.
• According to Canada Post (2026), a parcel sent within Canada can weigh up to 30 kg, with a maximum length plus girth of 3 m.
• According to Canada Post (2026), items over 22.7 kg (50 lb) must carry an Overweight Parcels sticker.
• According to Australia Post (2026), a parcel sent within Australia can weigh up to 22 kg, be up to 105 cm long, and measure up to 0.25 cubic metres.

What this means for your checkout

Shipping cost and delivery speed are among the top reasons shoppers leave a checkout, in Baymard's and DHL's surveys alike. The worst case is not a high rate but no rate at all: the buyer sees “Shipping not available” and cannot pay. Several of the limits above lead straight there: a cart over a carrier's weight limit, a carrier or app that does not answer within its time budget, a plan that loses carrier-calculated shipping, a country outside every active market. When live rates fail, what the buyer sees depends on your backup rates; our guide to carrier-calculated rates not showing walks through each case.

The free store check loads your checkout as an anonymous buyer in each country you ship to (up to eight) and shows which ones get no delivery option.

How to cite this page

When you quote a figure, please also credit its original source, linked next to it.

Methodology

The figures credited to ShipRateGuard (2026) come from our own store study, run 20 to 22 October 2026; its method and limits are on the study page. We read every other source on this page on 20 October 2026 and quote figures as their sources publish them, without recalculating or rounding them. The year next to a source is the year of the edition or data we read; for undated documentation pages (Shopify Help Center, Shopify developer documentation, carrier size guides), it is the year we read the current version. Surveys keep their own scope: Baymard's abandonment reasons are US online shoppers, Eurostat's figures are EU residents aged 16 to 74, and DHL's are its global sample of 29 countries. We left out widely repeated figures whose original source we could not open. We will update this page when the sources update.

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Related

• Shopify checkout shipping study (2026) Our test of 241 stores: how many lose a country at checkout.
• Shopify shipping prices by country (2026) Our test of 241 stores: delivery prices and free shipping by country.
• Shipping rates not showing at Shopify checkout Seven causes, in the order worth checking.
• “Shipping not available” at checkout Find the cause from who is affected.
• Carrier-calculated shipping not showing Timeouts, rejected parcels and backup rates.
• Checkout shipping error messages, decoded What each message means and where to look.
• Shipping rates wrong or too high at checkout Default package size, dimensional weight and handling fees.

Sources, all read 20 October 2026: Baymard Institute, “Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics” (last updated 22 September 2025) and “Use ‘Delivery Date’ Not ‘Shipping Speed’” (27 June 2023); DHL eCommerce, 2026 E-Commerce Trends Report page, and DHL Group press release of 2 June 2026; Eurostat, “E-commerce statistics for individuals” (data extracted February 2026); US Census Bureau, Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales, 2nd quarter 2026 (18 August 2026); Office for National Statistics, series J4MC (released 18 September 2026); Australia Post, eCommerce Report 2026 and “Size and weight guidelines”; Pitney Bowes, Parcel Shipping Index; Shopify Help Center, “Third-party shipping carrier accounts and availability”, “Backup shipping rates”, “Troubleshooting and testing shipping rates”, “Shipping rates”, “Shipping profiles”, “Understanding shipping carriers” and “Shipping labels in Shopify”; Shopify developer documentation, DeliveryCarrierService and Delivery Customization API; Shopify pricing and checkout pages; USPS, Ground Advantage; Royal Mail, “Size and weight guide”; Canada Post, “Size and weight restrictions” (parcel services in Canada, last updated 7 September 2026).