Don's note
This is the study I wish every restaurant owner read before picking a reservation platform. The question "how many steps does our reservation flow take?" sounds trivial. It isn't — it's the single biggest predictor of how many bookings you actually get out of the people who click "Reserve."
Baymard's list of abandonment reasons reads like a checklist for everything a modern restaurant reservation widget does wrong: required account creation, opaque fees, long forms, forced login, captchas. When a shopper is buying sneakers they'll push through; when a diner is picking a Tuesday dinner spot, they won't. Every platform decision — OpenTable vs. SevenRooms vs. a plain form that emails the host stand — lives or dies here.
Average cart abandonmentacross 49 separate studies (Baymard meta-analysis)
Key findings
- The meta-analysis covers 49 separate studies of online checkout abandonment across a wide range of retail categories. The averaged abandonment rate is approximately 70.19%.
- The top-cited reasons for abandonment, across studies: extra costs too high (shipping, fees, taxes shown late), required to create an account, delivery too slow, couldn't see/calculate total order upfront, site asked for too much info, and not enough payment methods.
- Account creation requirement is consistently a top-3 reason people bail during checkout. Guest-checkout options have a measurably lower abandonment rate.
- Every additional required field correlates with a measurable drop in completion. Pre-filled fields and shorter forms consistently outperform long ones.
- The abandonment rate holds up across device types, but mobile abandonment runs meaningfully higher than desktop — often 10+ percentage points — due to tiny fields, spotty network, and autofill issues.
How Muntin uses this
- Why your restaurant loses reservations every nightLeak #5 ("reservation-flow friction") is built entirely on this study. Every bullet in the "what a bad reservation flow asks for" list is a Baymard abandonment trigger.
- Wix vs. custom for restaurants: what breaks firstBreak #5 (reservation widget friction) uses Baymard's numbers to frame why a simpler, fewer-field reservation system measurably outperforms a branded third-party embed for low-volume independents.
Full citation
Baymard Institute. Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics. Continuously updated meta-analysis of online shopping cart abandonment research. baymard.com
Last reviewed: April 2026 — Baymard updates the meta-analysis on an ongoing basis as new studies are published. The 70% headline has been stable across updates.