Seven out of ten carts never turn into an order. Using data from Baymard, Google, and EHI, this guide shows which measures work in the checkout, for payment methods, and for page speed, and how to implement them in Shopware 6.
Conversion optimization means turning more of the visitors you already have into buyers. In almost every store, the levers sit in the same places: shipping costs, checkout, payment methods, page speed, and trust.
Around 70% of all carts are abandoned. Based on 50 studies, the Baymard Institute calculates an average abandonment rate of 70.22%. The most common avoidable reasons: extra costs too high (40%), delivery too slow (20%), and forced account creation (18%).
The first percentage points cost very little. Guest checkout, visible shipping costs, fewer form fields, and the right payment methods are settings in Shopware 6, not development projects. A/B tests only pay off after that, and only once you have a few hundred orders a month.
Before we founded solution25, we ran our own online store and grew it to more than 500 orders a day. A large part of that growth didn’t come from a bigger ad budget, but from a checkout that gradually lost fewer customers. Since 2017, we’ve seen the same patterns in Shopware projects.
Because every improvement applies to all of your existing traffic, conversion optimization is usually the cheapest way to more revenue. This article is for store owners and ecommerce managers who want to get more orders out of their visitors, with implementation tips for Shopware 6.
After reading it, you’ll be able to narrow down your store’s weak spots with numbers, rank the measures by effort and impact, and decide whether A/B testing already makes sense for your store.
It’s based on publicly available benchmarks, the settings in Shopware 6, and our project experience. All prices as of October 2026, excluding VAT.
A conversion is the action you want a visitor to take, which in an online store means placing an order. Conversion optimization (conversion rate optimization, or CRO for short) is the systematic work of getting a larger share of visitors to complete that action. It doesn’t start with traffic, but with the store itself: every percentage point you gain applies to all the visitors who come anyway, from Google, from ads, and from your newsletter.
Conversion rate is the share of sessions that end in an order: orders divided by sessions, times 100. A store with 20,000 sessions and 300 orders a month has a conversion rate of 1.5%.
Only compare numbers from the same source: tools calculate with sessions, users, or visits, and anyone who declines tracking in the consent banner is missing from the denominator but still places orders.
A quick calculation shows why the work pays off: with 20,000 sessions, a 1.5% conversion rate, and an average order value of €80, the store generates €24,000 a month. If the rate rises to 2.0%, that’s €32,000, a third more revenue on the same ad budget.
Freely available benchmarks are rare because the big market studies sit behind paywalls. One open source is Littledata: across 436 Shopify stores connected to Google Analytics 4, the median between late July and late October 2026 was 1.4%. Rates above 2.7% put a store in the top fifth, and 3.7% or more in the top ten percent.
The number depends heavily on industry, product range, and traffic source: in our projects, a consumables store with repeat customers is often above 3%, while a furniture retailer sits below 1%. The most important comparison is with your own rate three months ago, broken down by device and channel.
The most reliable freely available number comes from the Baymard Institute. Across 50 studies, it arrives at an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22% (as of September 2025). In other words, seven out of ten carts never become an order.
Some of that can’t be prevented: 42% of the US shoppers surveyed said they were just browsing or comparing prices. The remaining reasons are self-inflicted, and that’s exactly where conversion optimization comes in.
| Reason for abandonment (Baymard, US shoppers) | Share | Lever in the store |
|---|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, taxes, fees) | 40% | Show shipping costs early, set a free shipping threshold |
| Delivery too slow | 20% | Delivery time on the product page and in the cart, express option |
| Didn’t trust the site with credit card information | 19% | Well-known payment providers, trust seals, visible contact options |
| Forced account creation | 18% | Guest checkout as the default |
| Checkout too long or too complicated | 17% | Fewer fields, fewer steps, clear error messages |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% | Monitoring, test purchases after every update |
| Unsatisfactory return policy | 13% | State the return window and process in the checkout |
| Couldn’t see the total cost up front | 12% | Shipping cost calculator in the cart |
| Credit card declined | 10% | Offer an alternative payment method right away |
| Not enough payment methods | 9% | PayPal, pay by invoice, card, wallets |
Baymard also quantifies the potential: a large store can achieve up to 35% more conversions through better checkout design alone. That number applies to stores with significant flaws. The survey comes from the US; in Germany, payment methods carry more weight, more on that under Lever 4.
Figure: Costs, delivery time, and trust top the list; shipping costs, delivery time, and guest checkout can all be improved through settings in Shopware 6. Source: Baymard Institute, baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, as of September 2025
Without measurement, conversion optimization is guesswork. Before you change anything, you should know at which step most visitors drop off. That requires tracking that counts every order exactly once.
Google Analytics 4 comes with the ecommerce events you need: view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, add_payment_info, and purchase. Set up correctly in Shopware 6, they form a funnel that shows you the drop-off rate at each step; our guide to GA4 in Shopware 6 explains the setup with Consent Mode.
A rough rule of thumb from our projects: if you lose more than half of your visitors between cart and checkout start, it’s usually down to shipping costs or delivery time. If you lose more than a third between checkout start and payment, it’s the form, forced account creation, or the payment methods.
Mobile and desktop users behave differently, and an average hides that. In its current checkout benchmark, Baymard rates 63% of mobile checkouts as mediocre or worse, and 64% on desktop.
At 40%, extra costs are the number one avoidable reason for abandonment, and another 12% abandon because they couldn’t see the total cost up front. The solution isn’t a discount war, but transparency at the right moment.
Google evaluates user experience with three metrics, the Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1, each measured at the 75th percentile of real page views.
The case studies documented on web.dev are clear: Vodafone increased sales by 8% after improving LCP by 31%. Rakuten 24 raised its conversion rate by 33.13% and revenue per visitor by 53.37% by working on its Core Web Vitals. The BBC lost 10% of users for every additional second of load time.
In Shopware 6, the usual suspects are oversized images, too many extensions, an inactive HTTP cache, and undersized hosting. Measure with PageSpeed Insights separately for mobile and desktop; we describe the fixes under Shopware performance.
Above the fold, the product page has to answer four questions: What is it, what does it cost, when will it arrive, and how do I order it? Price, availability, delivery time, and the add-to-cart button belong on screen without scrolling, on smartphones too.
Trust comes from details: a legal notice with a phone number, a well-known trust seal such as Trusted Shops, payment provider logos, HTTPS without warnings, and reviews from real customers. In the checkout, notes about buyer protection and returns belong next to the payment selection, not in the footer.
By the time visitors reach the checkout, the intent to buy is already there. Every unnecessary field and every extra click costs you orders that were practically in the bag.
In 2024, Baymard measured the checkouts of large stores: on average, a checkout has 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields, even though 8 fields are usually enough. 89% of stores ask for the name in more than one field, 84% don’t postpone account creation until after the order, and 35% show the coupon field openly.
With two pages, the Shopware 6 default checkout is lean; most losses come from settings nobody ever touched and from extensions that add fields and steps.
Forced account creation is the reason for 18% of abandonments. In Shopware 6, you control this under Settings, Customer, Login & registration with the option to create a customer account by default. If it’s disabled, customers check out as guests and can create an account via a checkbox; if it’s enabled, customers have to actively choose guest checkout.
For B2C stores, we recommend guest checkout as the default and offering an account only after the order. The double opt-in option for guest orders should stay off, since it puts a confirmation email between order and payment. The pros and cons of guest checkout are covered under guest checkout in Shopware.
On the same settings page, you define which fields the form shows: salutation, title, phone number, birthday, and the two additional address lines each have their own “show” option. For a store without age verification and without delivery notifications by phone, you can switch all of them off.
On top of that, there’s the option to show a comment field on the order confirmation page under Settings, General, Cart, and the option requiring customers to accept the privacy policy via checkbox under Login & registration. Whether you need the checkbox is a question for your legal counsel; for processing a contract, the GDPR requires information, not consent.
In the Baymard survey, 9% of those who abandon cite too few payment methods, and another 10% a declined card. In Germany, this factor carries more weight because preferences are clearly distributed. Based on revenue data from 172 merchants, the EHI Online Payment 2026 study reports the following shares for 2025:
| Payment method | Share of online revenue 2025 (EHI) | Available in Shopware 6 via |
|---|---|---|
| PayPal | 28.7% | Shopware’s PayPal extension, Shopware Payments |
| Pay by invoice | 26.1% | Default “Invoice” payment method at your own risk, PayPal Pay upon Invoice, Klarna, Shopware Payments |
| Direct debit | 14.4% | Default payment method, SEPA via payment provider |
| Credit and debit card | 13.7% | Shopware Payments, PayPal card payments, providers like Stripe, Mollie, Adyen |
| Installments | 4.7% | PayPal installments, Klarna |
| Prepayment | 3.5% | Default payment method |
| Apple Pay | 1.3% | Shopware Payments or providers with a Shopware extension |
The combination that works best in our B2C projects: PayPal, pay by invoice through a provider that assumes the risk, credit card, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay for mobile shoppers, with prepayment as a safety net. More than six options confuse people; fewer than four cost you orders.
Shopware Payments bundles Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Klarna, and PayPal Pay upon Invoice in one integration for merchants in Germany and Austria, billed per successful transaction with no additional license fees. The fees are listed on the Shopware Payments pricing page; how they fit into your overall budget is covered in our article on Shopware pricing.
Under Settings, Commerce, Payment methods, you use “Position” to set the order in the checkout; the most-used payment method belongs at the top. With an availability rule from the Rule Builder, you can, for example, hide pay by invoice above a certain order value instead of removing the payment method entirely. A payment method only appears in the store once it’s assigned to the sales channel.
The PayPal extension also includes the Express button: with the “Direct to PayPal” options, it appears on the product page, cart, off-canvas cart, listing pages, and login page, and customers skip entering their address. We describe the setup under integrating PayPal in Shopware 6.
Even the best checkout loses customers who get interrupted, compare prices, or wait for payday. Abandoned cart emails win some of them back, as long as they’re set up in a legally compliant way.
Based on an analysis of more than 110,000 customer accounts, Klaviyo reports an average click rate of 6% (top ten percent: 11.3%) and revenue per recipient of $6.77. In our projects, a series has proven effective: a reminder after two to four hours, a second message after 24 hours, and a final one after 48 hours. Only offer a discount in the last step; otherwise customers learn that abandoning pays off.
An abandoned cart email counts as advertising by electronic mail and, under § 7(2) No. 2 of the German Unfair Competition Act (UWG), requires the recipient’s prior express consent; the email address from the checkout alone doesn’t count. Without consent, the only option is the existing customer exception under § 7(3) UWG: the address comes from a previous purchase, the advertising is for similar products of your own, the customer hasn’t objected, and they’re informed of their right to object when the address is collected and in every email.
In practice, this means emails to guests who have never purchased are off limits without double opt-in. Obtain consent at newsletter signup or account creation with a separate checkbox. eRecht24 offers an overview with current court rulings; the details are a matter for your legal counsel.
The Shopware 6 Flow Builder has no trigger for abandoned carts, and delayed actions are only available in the Beyond plan. Abandoned cart emails therefore run through an email tool connected to Shopware or an extension from the Shopware Store. Klaviyo, for example, starts the flow from the “Started Checkout” event sent from Shopware and filters out recipients who have since placed an order; CleverReach, Mailchimp, and Brevo offer comparable automations.
For stores with logged-in customers, for example in B2B, you can do without mass emails: our Abandoned Cart Saver lists abandoned carts of logged-in customers in the admin, your sales team calls them, and creates the order with one click.
The following table ranks the measures by effort and impact. The impact estimates are based on experience from our Shopware projects, not guaranteed results; how strongly a lever works depends on your starting point.
| Measure | Implementation in Shopware 6 | Effort | Expected impact (from experience) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest checkout as the default | Disable “create customer account by default” | 15 minutes | High, especially for new customers and on mobile |
| Shipping costs and delivery time in the cart | Options under Settings, General, Cart | 30 minutes | High, fewer abandonments before the checkout |
| Reduce form fields | Switch off salutation, title, phone, birthday, additional address lines | 15 minutes | Medium, significant on mobile |
| PayPal Express on product page and in cart | PayPal extension, “Direct to PayPal” options | 1 hour | Medium, high on mobile |
| Pay by invoice with risk coverage | PayPal Pay upon Invoice, Klarna, or Shopware Payments | 1 to 2 days including approval | High for new customers and higher order values |
| Free shipping threshold with notice | Price matrix by cart value plus notice in the theme | 0.5 to 2 days | Medium on conversion, high on order value |
| Move the coupon field behind a link | Theme customization | 0.5 days | Low to medium |
| Images, HTTP cache, plugin audit | See Shopware performance | 2 to 5 days | Medium to high, depending on your starting point |
| Cross-selling on the product page | Cross-selling tab, dynamic product group | 0.5 to 1 day | Order value up 5 to 15% |
| Abandoned cart series | Email tool connected to Shopware | 1 to 3 days | Medium, only with consent |
Our take: We recommend implementing the first five rows of the table before running any A/B test. You can get them done in a morning, and in most stores they deliver more than any later testing program, because they directly tackle the most common avoidable reasons for abandonment.
A/B tests belong in the second phase, once the obvious flaws are fixed and you’re dealing with variants that can’t be derived from data: product page layout, button copy, placement of trust elements.
A test needs traffic, and more of it than most merchants expect. To prove an improvement in conversion rate from 2.0 to 2.2% with statistical rigor, the standard sample size formula gives you roughly 80,000 visitors per variant (80% power, 5% significance level). A store with 30,000 sessions a month would need a good five months for this one test.
Our rule of thumb: below 500 orders a month, A/B tests are a waste of time; implement the well-proven measures and measure before and after. Once you’re at a few thousand orders a month, testing becomes an ongoing program.
The right order depends on the size of your store and the state of your checkout. Three typical situations from our projects:
The limits: conversion optimization gets more out of existing traffic, but it doesn’t replace the right product range or competitive prices and delivery times.
At the cosmetics brand Banana Beauty, conversion rates were below their potential, and many users left the Shopware store before buying. We reworked navigation, product pages, and checkout, cut load times by 40%, and A/B tested new CTAs, layout variants, and product highlights. Dashboards with metrics on load time, conversion rate, and engagement supported the period after go-live.
According to the case study, conversions rose by 28%, mainly thanks to better user guidance and optimized checkout flows. For your store, that means page speed and checkout first, tests after, and track every change with metrics.
Any store owner can apply the settings in this article themselves. Agency work pays off where data needs to be interpreted, themes customized, or tests set up. As a guideline from our projects: quick wins including theme customizations take one to three agency days, a conversion audit with funnel analysis, checkout review, and priority list costs €1,500 to €5,000, and an ongoing testing program €1,500 to €5,000 a month plus the tool license.
What we offer is described under CRO services for Shopware and Shopify.
Conversion optimization is the systematic improvement of a store so that a larger share of visitors buy; a conversion means turning a visitor into a buyer. Unlike SEO or advertising, it doesn’t focus on more traffic, but on getting more out of the traffic you already have.
Divide the number of orders by the number of sessions in the same period and multiply by 100: 300 orders from 20,000 sessions gives you 1.5%. Analyze by device and channel separately, because the average hides problems.
At Littledata, the median across 436 Shopify stores in fall 2026 was 1.4%, the top fifth above 2.7%, and the top ten percent at 3.7% or more. In our projects, B2C stores usually land between 1 and 3%, depending on industry and order value.
In this order: show shipping costs and delivery time early, make guest checkout the default, use fewer form fields, offer PayPal, pay by invoice, and card, bring page speed under the Core Web Vitals thresholds, and place trust elements in the checkout. Only after that do abandoned cart emails and A/B tests pay off.
In Germany, only with prior express consent (§ 7(2) No. 2 UWG) or within the narrow limits of the existing customer exception under § 7(3) UWG; the email address from the checkout alone isn’t enough. Obtain consent via double opt-in and have the setup reviewed by a lawyer.
At least two full weeks, and until the required sample size is reached. To prove an improvement from 2.0 to 2.2%, that’s roughly 80,000 visitors per variant.
Want to know where your store is losing customers before you invest budget? Our free store audit reviews your homepage, category page, product page, and checkout on desktop and smartphone, measures load time and Core Web Vitals, and delivers a prioritized list of issues as a PDF within two business days. It doesn’t need any access to your store.
If you’d like us to implement the measures from this article, from the settings to the testing program: get in touch. We’ll tell you up front which levers are worth it for a store your size.
Learn more about how we work, our certifications, and our locations on the solution25 Shopware agency page.
Besar Bilalli is co-founder and Co-CEO of solution25, the Shopware agency based in Bremen. Before founding the agency in 2017, he and Besnik Bilalli built their own online store without any startup capital and grew it to more than 500 orders a day. Since then, he has guided merchants through Shopware projects, from platform selection to day-to-day operations. He’s happy to answer questions about this article personally: get in touch.
Responsible for content and updates: Besar Bilalli. Last updated: October 2026. Next content review: January 2027.
