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The cost that shows up at the end: reveal it earlier or save it for the last step

You'll know whether to show shipping, fees, or a booking deposit from the product page or at the final step, depending on where you're losing people.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026

Your listing is ready, the price is set right. Someone comes in, looks, almost decides, reaches the last step of payment or booking, and leaves. You check your funnel and see a spike right there: at the step where the booking deposit or the shipping cost shows up.

You wonder if the problem is the final price or the moment you reveal it. Raising a price isn't the same as moving where it appears. The question here isn't how much to charge, it's when to say it.

The step where trust breaks down

If you count how many people reach each step, like you already know how to do, and you see the drop happens right at the step where the extra cost shows up, whether that's shipping, a fee, or the deposit for a booking, what's driving people away isn't the price on the product page. It's that extra cost and the moment it appears. In the Baymard Institute study of US online shoppers, once you set aside people who were just browsing, the most common reason for abandoning an order is that extra costs, like shipping, taxes, or fees, were too high: 40%. And 12% left because they couldn't see or calculate the total cost of the order from the start.

A large experiment measured this in 2015 on StubHub, a US ticket resale site. Half of its visitors were shown the all-in price from the start, a 15% commission on the ticket price plus shipping when it applied; the other half only saw it at checkout. According to the study by Blake, Moshary, Sweeney, and Tadelis, people who didn't see the fees until the end chose a ticket almost 19% more often, but once at checkout, they were almost 45% less likely to go through with the purchase. Look at the full result too: with hidden fees, purchase probability rose 14% across the whole experiment, and spending rose almost 21%. Showing fees upfront cut the drop-off at the last step, but it sold less.

If instead the abandonment is spread evenly across the whole process, at similar rates at every step, the extra cost is probably not the cause: on StubHub, people who saw the fees from the start left more often before even looking at a ticket, and people who saw them at the end left more often at checkout, right when they saw them. Fixing this probably won't help; keep looking elsewhere before you change anything here.

In Spain, on top of that, you can't hold the cost back until the last step if you're selling to consumers. The General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users requires, in Article 20, that any offer showing the product and its price, and letting the customer decide to buy, include the full final price with taxes, and break out any additional charges you'll bill, including handling fees. If those charges can't be calculated ahead of time for objective reasons, you must disclose that they exist and, if known, their estimated amount. Think of shipping that varies by address. Failing to do this counts as an unfair, misleading practice. And for online purchases, Article 98 requires that the total price and those charges be shown clearly and prominently right before the customer places the order.

This is different from a custom quote, which doesn't go on the product page or in the catalog. That gets billed separately, with a payment link you send once you've already talked things through.

The more the extra cost weighs on the total, the more reason to show it upfront. In the example, shipping that's 7% of the total doesn't weigh much when it shows up at the end. A deposit that's almost a quarter of the price, if it suddenly appears at the last step, does stand out, and not in a good way.