Cart Abandonment Benchmarks Benchmarks
Cart abandonment averages 60–80% across online retail. See benchmarks by vertical and device, plus how to tell whether your rate signals a checkout problem or a traffic-quality one.
Cart Abandonment Benchmarks
Cart abandonment averages 60–80% across online retail; under 50% is exceptional, over 85% usually signals a broken checkout or low-intent traffic.
Cart abandonment rate is the share of shoppers who add at least one item to their cart but leave before completing checkout. Across online retail it sits between 60% and 80% depending on vertical, device, and traffic mix — a band that has stayed remarkably stable for a decade despite huge improvements in payment UX.
Benchmarks matter because the headline number is almost meaningless in isolation. A 78% rate is great for a furniture store and alarming for a repeat-purchase beauty brand. The useful comparison is always segmented: your vertical, your device split, your average order value tier, and your channel mix.
The number you see in GA4 or Shopify is the easy part. The hard part is knowing whether 72% means your checkout is leaking or your paid social traffic is full of price-checkers who were never going to buy. Benchmarks help you tell those two stories apart.
Two things drive most of the variance between stores: order value (higher AOV means more deliberation, more abandonment) and device (mobile abandons 10–15 points higher than desktop almost everywhere). Adjust for both before you compare yourself to a peer.
Cart abandonment rate by vertical and device (online retail)
| Vertical | Desktop | Mobile | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel & fashion | 65% | 78% | 72% |
| Beauty & cosmetics | 62% | 74% | 69% |
| Home & furniture | 74% | 84% | 80% |
| Electronics | 70% | 82% | 77% |
| Food & beverage | 58% | 70% | 65% |
| Health & supplements | 60% | 72% | 67% |
| Jewellery & luxury | 76% | 86% | 82% |
Notice the spread: a 65% rate is below average for fashion but above average for food and beverage. Use the vertical row closest to your catalogue, then check whether your device split matches the mobile/desktop gap shown here.
Mobile vs desktop cart abandonment by vertical
Desktop
Mobile
How to read your number against these benchmarks
Start by isolating intent. Strip out add-to-carts from paid social cold audiences, abandoned guest carts older than 24 hours, and bot traffic. The number that matters is the abandonment rate of shoppers who reached the checkout page with a real intent signal — typically email entered, shipping started, or returning visitor.
Then segment by step. If most of your abandonment happens between cart and shipping, you have a friction or shipping-cost problem. If it happens between shipping and payment, you have a payment-method or trust problem. The benchmark is a starting line, not a diagnosis.
Below 50% is suspicious, not impressive
If your reported rate is under 50%, check your tracking before celebrating. The most common cause is counting only checkout-started events instead of all add-to-carts — which silently strips the highest-abandonment step out of the funnel and flatters the metric.
What actually moves the number
Shipping cost transparency is the single biggest lever. Showing the full delivered price before the checkout step — on the product page or the cart drawer — typically reduces abandonment by 3–6 percentage points. Surprise shipping costs at step two are the #1 cited reason for abandonment in every survey for the last ten years.
After that, in rough order of impact: guest checkout, express payment wallets (Apple Pay, Shop Pay), shortening the form to fewer than eight fields, and address autocomplete. None of these are novel — but most stores in the 75%+ range are missing at least two of them, and the cumulative effect is usually 5–10 points of rate recovery.
Cart abandonment benchmark FAQ
For most online retail, anything between 60% and 75% is normal. Below 60% is strong, below 50% is exceptional and worth double-checking your tracking. The 'good' number depends heavily on your vertical — 70% is great for furniture but mediocre for food and beverage.
Mobile shoppers are more likely to browse with low purchase intent, more likely to be interrupted, and more likely to hit form friction. The gap is typically 10–15 percentage points. Express wallets like Apple Pay and Shop Pay close most of it when implemented well.
Cart abandonment counts everyone who added an item but didn't buy. Checkout abandonment is narrower — only people who started the checkout flow and didn't finish. Checkout abandonment rates are lower (typically 45–65%) because reaching checkout already filters for intent.
Yes, and that's a feature not a bug. Add-to-cart is often used as a 'save for later' or price-comparison action, especially on mobile. That's why benchmarks are high — and why isolating high-intent abandonment matters more than the headline number.
(1 − completed checkouts ÷ carts created) × 100. So if 1,000 shoppers added to cart and 280 completed checkout, your abandonment rate is (1 − 280/1000) × 100 = 72%. Make sure 'carts created' counts unique sessions, not raw add-to-cart events.
Yes — recovery emails typically recover 8–15% of abandoned carts when set up well, with the first email (sent 1–4 hours after abandonment) doing most of the work. The bigger opportunity, though, is preventing the abandonment in the first place via checkout UX.
Stock Shopify checkout tends to perform 2–4 points better than the vertical average thanks to Shop Pay and the streamlined three-step flow. If you're using stock Shopify and still seeing 80%+ abandonment, the problem is almost certainly upstream — traffic quality, pricing, or the cart drawer.
Free shipping itself helps, but transparency matters more than the offer. Stores that surface delivered price early — even when it's not free — often see similar gains to stores that absorb shipping entirely. Surprise costs at step two are what kills the conversion.
Absolutely. Paid social traffic typically abandons 10–20 points higher than email or organic search. If your blended rate is climbing, check whether it's a checkout issue or just a shift in your channel mix — the fix is different in each case.
Pick the vertical row in the table above, then aim for the desktop figure as your overall rate target. If you're at 78% in apparel today, getting to 72% over twelve months is realistic with checkout work. Going below the desktop benchmark requires unusually high-intent traffic or a returning-customer-heavy mix.
Get an AI expert review of your site
Paste your URL — Metricuno's AI runs the same heuristic checks a senior CRO consultant would, scoring your page and prioritising the fixes that'll move conversion fastest.