[Cerium]

One thing with Shopify that drives the high abandonment rate is that shipping rates are usually not calculated until the second page of checkout. On many stores the only way to get a shipping estimate is to add something to a cart and get to the second page of checkout.

[jimnotgym]

And that suggests to me that these are not the kind of abandonments that are going to be avoided by redesigning your checkout. This user weld simply bounce somewhere else instead. It is trivial to put a shipping estimate on the product pages, and make customers bounce there instead...but they will still bounce

[bombcar]

This is huge - and annoying. I like to avoid Amazon when I can, but if I can't figure out what shipping is going to cost until the cart is almost finished being checked out, I'll bounce.

[base]

In small business stores most users checkout as guests, so the website only has enough info to provide a shipping estimate after they have your address.

[nucleardog]

At least let me pick a country or something and give me a ballpark.

With a lot of US-only retailers the only way to find out they won’t ship outside the US is to try and checkout and look for a country drop down.

And the ones that will ship, shipping for a small parcel can range from inconsequential (free/$10) through punishing ($80) to absurd ($300).

I don’t need an exact amount, but there can be a couple order of magnitude difference between stores when trying to ship to Canada and often no way to determine they even will at all without going through the checkout flow.

[bombcar]

Exactly - and in the USA I just need a “zip code = estimate” so I know if I’m looking at $10 or $50.