Are cart items always visible during checkout?

In the real world we can always see what is being put through the checkout and can back out on an item at any point. However, online retailers have the option of displaying the contents of a cart or suppressing it during the checkout process. Unfortunately, because so few retailers always show the cart contents, sample sizes are too low to drawn meaningful conclusions on a group-by-group basis. Overall, those who show carts contents throughout the checkout process have a 5.8% conversion rate compared to 5.2% for those who do not.

Many retailers jumped in and out of showing cart contents based on where a shopper was in the checkout; the most common being to suppress it during the collection of billing and shipping addresses and make it reappear during payment collection screens. In very few instances we observed cart contents being on full display on every page of the site and checkout process. For this tactic, online retail rarely mimics the real world.

Just 14% of Top 100 retailers chose to always show cart items during the checkout process.