Cart Abandonment Rate
Cart abandonment rate is the share of shoppers who add to cart but never check out. Here's the formula, realistic benchmarks, and how to read the number.
Cart Abandonment Rate
The percentage of shoppers who add an item to their cart but leave without completing the purchase.
Cart abandonment rate measures the gap between intent and revenue. Of every 100 shoppers who add something to their cart, how many never finish checking out? Across online retail, the typical range sits between 60% and 80%, which sounds catastrophic until you remember that adding to cart is often a research behaviour — shoppers price-check, save for later, or compare across tabs.
The metric becomes diagnostic at the edges. Sub-50% usually signals a high-intent audience and a frictionless checkout. Above 85% usually signals either a broken checkout flow (failing payment provider, surprise shipping costs, mandatory account creation) or paid traffic with weak product-market fit.
Cart abandonment is one of the most-watched ecommerce metrics because it sits exactly where money is won or lost. A shopper who reaches the cart has already done the hard cognitive work — chosen the product, accepted the price, decided to buy. Losing them in the next 90 seconds is expensive.
It's also one of the most misread numbers on a dashboard. A 72% abandonment rate is not a five-alarm fire — it's average. The signal is in how the rate moves week-over-week, how it splits by device and payment method, and how it compares to checkout abandonment (the narrower metric covering only shoppers who reached the checkout page).
Cart Abandonment Rate = (1 - (Completed Purchases / Carts Created)) * 100
Carts Created
Carts Created
Unique sessions where at least one item was added to cart in the period.
Completed Purchases
Completed Purchases
Orders successfully placed from those carts in the same period.
A Shopify apparel store sees 12,400 sessions create a cart in October. Of those, 3,100 complete a purchase.
Carts Created: 12400
Completed Purchases: 3100
→ 75.0%
75% sits squarely inside the apparel benchmark band of 70-82%. There's no acute checkout problem, but mobile-specific drop-off or shipping-threshold friction may still leave 2-4 points of recoverable rate on the table.
Two practical notes on the formula. First, attribute carts and purchases inside the same time window — comparing October carts to October-plus-recovery-email purchases inflates the apparent recovery rate. Second, measure per session, not per user. A returning shopper who abandons twice and buys once is three carts and one purchase, not one of each.
Typical cart abandonment rate by vertical and device
| Vertical | Desktop | Mobile | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel & accessories | 68% | 78% | 73% |
| Beauty & personal care | 64% | 74% | 70% |
| Home & furniture | 76% | 84% | 81% |
| Consumer electronics | 72% | 82% | 78% |
| Food & beverage (DTC) | 58% | 68% | 64% |
| Health & supplements | 62% | 72% | 68% |
Mobile abandonment runs 8-12 points higher than desktop in almost every vertical. Smaller screens, fiddlier form fields, and interrupted sessions all conspire against completion. If your overall rate is climbing, check whether mobile share of carts is climbing first — the metric may be moving for traffic-mix reasons, not checkout-quality reasons.
Cart abandonment rate FAQ
For most online stores, anywhere between 60% and 75% is normal. Below 60% is strong and usually indicates a high-intent audience plus a clean checkout. Above 80% warrants investigation, especially if the rate has climbed recently.
Cart abandonment covers everyone who added to cart but didn't buy. Checkout abandonment is narrower — only shoppers who reached the checkout page and then left. Checkout abandonment is a sharper diagnostic for payment, shipping, and form-field friction.
Shopify's default Cart Analytics counts add-to-cart sessions liberally, including price-checking and wishlist behaviour. Rates of 70-80% are normal. If you're seeing 85%+, the usual suspects are surprise shipping costs at checkout, slow mobile load, or a payment method your audience expects (Klarna, Apple Pay, iDEAL) being missing.
Yes — that's the whole point. Anyone who created a cart and didn't complete a purchase in the measurement window counts as abandoned, regardless of whether they reached the checkout page.
The biggest levers are shipping transparency (show costs before checkout), guest checkout (skip mandatory account creation), payment variety (add wallets and BNPL options local to your market), and mobile speed (under 3 seconds to interactive). Abandoned-cart email and SMS flows typically recover another 5-10% of lost revenue.
No — keep cart abandonment rate as the raw, pre-recovery number. Track recovered revenue separately. Mixing them hides whether your checkout is actually improving or whether you're just papering over leaks with email.
They're inversely linked but measure different denominators. Conversion rate is purchases divided by all sessions; cart abandonment is non-purchases divided by sessions that created a cart. A site can have steady conversion rate while cart abandonment climbs if add-to-cart rate is rising faster than purchases.
Browse abandonment covers shoppers who viewed a product but never added to cart. Cart abandonment starts one step later. Browse abandonment rates are typically 95%+ and are normal; cart abandonment is the metric that actually predicts revenue loss.
Weekly is enough for trend monitoring. Spot-check daily during sales periods or after any checkout change — a 4-5 point jump within 48 hours of a deploy is the signature of a broken payment integration or new form-field error.
Only loosely. Use vertical and device benchmarks (apparel mobile, beauty desktop, etc.) as a sanity check, not a target. Your own historical baseline — and the rate of change against it — is a far more reliable signal than a competitor number you can't fully trust.
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