What is Cart Abandonment Rate?

Why It Matters

Cart abandonment rate matters because it isolates one of the most fixable revenue leaks in ecommerce: shoppers who already showed strong intent by adding a product to their cart, then dropped off before paying. It matters because those shoppers are far easier to win back than someone who never engaged at all, so a high abandonment rate represents recoverable revenue sitting in plain sight rather than a demand problem. Ignoring it means leaving retargeting emails, checkout simplification, and other low-cost fixes on the table while continuing to spend on new traffic to replace the revenue that's actually just stuck at checkout. It also serves as an early warning for checkout-specific friction, like unexpected shipping costs or a clunky payment form, that wouldn't show up in broader conversion rate numbers. Because the fixes for cart abandonment are typically cheap relative to acquiring new traffic, it's one of the highest-leverage metrics for a store to actively work on improving.

Example

An ecommerce store sees 2,000 carts created in a week, and 1,500 of them never reach a completed checkout. Abandonment rate is 1,500 divided by 2,000, times 100, which equals 75%, a figure close to typical industry averages that often surprise store owners who assume most abandoned carts are unusual. Retargeting emails sent within a few hours of abandonment, simplified checkout forms, and showing shipping costs earlier in the flow are the most common levers used to bring that percentage down without changing the product or price at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What counts as an abandoned cart?

  Any cart where a shopper added at least one item but did not complete checkout within the tracking window a store defines, which is usually the same session or within a set number of hours or days afterward.

• How is cart abandonment rate different from checkout abandonment rate?

  Cart abandonment rate covers everyone who added an item but never started checkout at all, while checkout abandonment rate narrows in specifically on shoppers who started the checkout process but didn't finish, which usually points more precisely at payment or form friction.

• What's a typical cart abandonment rate?

  Rates commonly fall in the 60 to 80% range across ecommerce broadly, which surprises many store owners, but the right benchmark to compare against is a store's own historical rate rather than an industry-wide figure.

• How often is cart abandonment rate tracked?

  Most ecommerce platforms report it continuously, and teams typically review it weekly to catch spikes tied to checkout bugs, pricing changes, or shipping cost surprises.

• What most commonly causes carts to be abandoned?

  Unexpected costs revealed late in checkout, a required account creation step, a checkout process with too many steps, and limited payment options are consistently the top reported reasons shoppers give for abandoning a cart.