Cart abandonment rate, how to calculate it and what moves it

A shopper adds an item to the cart. Then one of two things happens. They buy, or they leave. Cart abandonment rate measures how often they leave.

It is one of the clearest numbers in ecommerce because it sits right next to money. Each abandoned cart has a value. Multiply the rate by your traffic and average cart value, and you see how much revenue walks away every month.

A high rate is not a sign that something is broken. Many people use carts as a wish list, compare prices or are not ready to buy yet. The goal is not zero. The goal is to fix what you can on the site and win back the carts that were close.

Cart abandonment rate = (1 minus completed purchases divided by carts created) times 100

Worked example (example store with assumed numbers)

This is an example only, not data from any real store.

• Carts created in a month: 4 000
• Completed purchases from those carts: 1 200
• 1 200 divided by 4 000 = 0.30
• 1 minus 0.30 = 0.70
• 0.70 times 100 = 70 percent cart abandonment rate

If the example store's average cart is worth 80 USD, the 2 800 abandoned carts hold about 224 000 USD in cart value. Not all of that is recoverable, but it shows the size of the opportunity.

What to count, and what to leave out

• Count carts, not sessions. A shopper who visits five times with the same cart is one cart.
• Use the same time window. Compare carts created and purchases completed in the same period, and allow a short lag for people who buy the next day.
• Exclude test orders and bots. Internal tests and bot traffic can push the rate up or down.
• Decide how to treat merged carts. If a shopper logs in and two carts merge, count it once.

Your store platform reports orders, and many analytics setups report add to cart events. If the two systems define a cart differently, your rate will look odd. Pick one source and stick with it, so changes over time mean something.

The two terms get mixed up, but they answer different questions.

Checkout abandonment is usually lower, because people who start checkout are further along. But each checkout abandoner is worth more attention. They chose a product, typed their details and often left because of a small problem: a surprise fee, a missing payment option or a card decline.

Tracking both helps you find where the problem sits. A high cart rate with a normal checkout rate often points to price, product pages or shipping cost shown too late. A high checkout rate points to the checkout itself.

Industry studies such as Baymard Institute report an average cart abandonment rate of about 70 percent across many online stores. That number is useful as context. It tells you a 65 or 75 percent rate is normal, not a crisis.

Be careful with exact benchmarks by industry, country or device that you see quoted without a source. Methods differ, samples are small and the numbers drift. Your own trend over time is far more useful than any outside average.

Mobile and desktop behave differently

Most studies agree that shoppers on phones abandon carts more often than shoppers on desktop. Small screens make forms harder, people get interrupted more and many use their phone to browse and their laptop to buy. Look at your own rate by device. If mobile is much worse, your mobile checkout is the first place to look.

Survey research on why people leave carts keeps pointing to the same reasons. Most of them are under your control.

1. Unexpected costs. Shipping, taxes or fees that appear only at the last step. This is the most common reason in most surveys.
2. Forced account creation. Asking for a password before payment. Offer guest checkout.
3. Slow or long checkout. Too many fields, too many steps or pages that load slowly on mobile.
4. Missing payment options. No digital wallet, no buy now pay later, or no local payment method the shopper expects.
5. Trust doubts. No clear return policy, unclear delivery times or a site that looks unsafe at checkout.
6. Delivery speed. The shopper needs the item by a date and the estimate is too slow or not shown.
7. Card declines. The payment fails and the shopper does not try again.

Each fix you make on the site lowers the rate for every future shopper. Our guide on how to reduce cart abandonment walks through these fixes one by one.

Site fixes stop carts from being abandoned. Good abandoned cart recovery wins back some of the ones that still are. You need both.

What recovery can do:

• Remind shoppers who got interrupted, which is a large share of all abandonment
• Answer a question or fix a payment problem that stopped the order
• Offer free shipping or a small, capped discount to shoppers who left over price
• Reach the shopper on the channel they actually read, such as email, SMS or WhatsApp, with consent

What recovery cannot do:

• Fix a checkout that breaks on mobile
• Make a high shipping fee feel fair every time
• Win back shoppers who were never going to buy
• Replace a missing payment method

If recovery messages bring people back to a checkout that still has the same problem, they will leave again. Fix the site first, then let recovery handle the rest. For checkout-stage carts specifically, see our page on abandoned checkout recovery.

Most recovery tools report "recovered revenue" as every order that came after a recovery message. That number is too generous. Some of those shoppers would have come back anyway.

The honest way to measure is a holdout group:

1. Randomly put a small share of abandoned carts, for example 10 percent, in a group that gets no recovery messages.
2. Send recovery messages to everyone else as usual.
3. Compare the purchase rate of the two groups over the same period.
4. The difference is your incremental recovered revenue, the money that would not have come in without recovery.

Example with assumed numbers

This is an example store, not real data. 1 000 carts are in the holdout and 9 000 get messages. 8 percent of the holdout buy anyway. 14 percent of the messaged group buy. The incremental lift is 6 points, so about 540 of the 9 000 messaged carts are truly recovered. Attribution alone would have claimed all 1 260 purchases.

A few more habits that keep the numbers honest:

• Subtract discounts. A recovered order with 15 percent off is worth less than a full-price one.
• Look at margin, not just revenue. A tool that recovers more carts by giving everyone a coupon may lose you money.
• Compare to cost. Put recovered revenue next to what you pay for the tool and the messages.

CartAbandon shows "Recovered this month" next to "CartAbandon cost" in the ROI panel. On Scale and Plus, holdout groups measure incremental recovered revenue directly, so you see the lift your flows really add.