Cart Abandonment Rate: How to Calculate, Benchmark, and Reduce It

Your store has decent traffic and plenty of carts being built, but the sales do not add up. Somewhere between “add to cart” and “order confirmed,” shoppers are quietly leaving, and your cart abandonment rate is the number that shows exactly how often that happens.

This guide covers the exact formula, what the benchmarks actually mean by industry and device, and where most stores lose the most carts.

Cart abandonment rate measures the share of shopping sessions where someone adds a product to their cart and then leaves without paying. It is one of the clearest signals that something between browsing and buying is not working.

The term gets mixed up with a narrower metric, and that mix-up is where a lot of confusing benchmarks come from:

• Cart abandonment counts everyone who added an item, including shoppers who never opened checkout at all.
• Checkout abandonment only counts shoppers who started the checkout process and then stopped partway through.

A store can have a high cart abandonment rate and a fairly healthy checkout abandonment rate at the same time, since most of the drop-off can happen earlier, during browsing. Confirm which one your dashboard is actually showing before you compare it to anyone else’s number.

The standard cart abandonment rate formula is:

Cart Abandonment Rate = (1 − (Completed Purchases ÷ Carts Created)) × 100

You can also write it as abandoned carts divided by total carts created, multiplied by 100. Both give you the same answer.

How to calculate it in three steps:

1. Pick a timeframe. A week or a month, whatever you can repeat consistently.
2. Pull two numbers. Total carts created and completed purchases for that period.
3. Run the formula. Example: 1,000 carts created, 280 completed purchases → (1 − 280/1,000) × 100 = 72%.

Prefer not to do the math yourself? Adflipr’s Cart Abandonment Revenue Calculator runs the formula for you and estimates the revenue sitting behind your number.

You can also pull this straight from your platform:

• Shopify stores can find it in the Behavior reports inside Analytics.
• WooCommerce stores usually need a cart tracking plugin, since WooCommerce does not log abandoned carts by default.
• Google Analytics 4 can build this view from its ecommerce funnel exploration reports, comparing “add to cart” against “purchase” events.

Whichever source you use, keep the cart definition and timeframe the same every time. A rate calculated one way this month and differently next month will look like a trend when it is really just a tracking change.

Search around and you will see the average cart abandonment rate reported anywhere from 68% to over 80%. That spread is not because one source is wrong, it usually comes down to one of these:

• Different definitions. Some track raw cart abandonment, others track only checkout abandonment.
• Different data sources. Analytics platform data and shopper survey data rarely match exactly.
• Different samples. A study weighted toward fashion stores lands higher than one weighted toward groceries.

The most widely cited figure comes from the Baymard Institute, which aggregates dozens of independent studies and lands just above 70%. That number has barely moved in a decade, which tells you it is a reference point, not a target. A more useful goal is your own industry benchmark, adjusted down by roughly 5 to 10 percent, not the global average.

Two variables move this number more than anything else: what you sell, and what device your shoppers are using. Breaking down cart abandonment rate by industry makes the raw average far more useful, since “normal” for a jewelry brand looks nothing like “normal” for a grocery store.

Mobile runs higher across almost every category, mainly because smaller screens and longer forms make checkout harder to finish on a phone. Treat both tables as a starting point. A 78% rate is close to normal for a fashion store; the same number for a grocery brand points to a real problem.

Once you know your number is genuinely worse than your category’s benchmark, the next question is what is causing it. Research into checkout drop-off, most notably from Baymard Institute, keeps finding the same handful of culprits:

• Costs that show up late. Shipping fees, taxes, and surcharges that only appear at the final step are consistently the top reported reason shoppers leave, roughly half of all abandonment traces back to this.
• Forced account creation. Requiring a new account before checkout adds friction right when a shopper is closest to buying.
• Checkout forms that ask for too much. Every extra field is another reason to give up, especially on mobile.
• Limited payment options. A shopper without their preferred payment method available will often just leave rather than switch cards.
• Slow page load, particularly on mobile. A checkout page that takes more than a couple of seconds to load loses shoppers before they see the payment form.

Look at your own checkout funnel step by step, and you can usually see exactly which stage loses the most people, no guesswork required.

Sometimes a high cart abandonment rate is not a shopper problem at all, it is a measurement problem:

• Inconsistent cart definitions. Counting a cart as “created” the moment one item is added versus only when checkout begins produces very different numbers from the same store.
• Not filtering test orders and bot traffic. Automated crawlers and internal test checkouts quietly inflate the abandoned side of the count.
• Ignoring device and channel splits. A blended average hides the fact that mobile and social traffic usually abandon far more than desktop and email traffic.
• Comparing across inconsistent timeframes. A weekly number compared against a monthly number will look like a real swing even when nothing changed.

Fixing the tracking often moves the reported number more than any UX change does, so rule it out before you start redesigning checkout.

The exact tactics depend on which cause is driving your number, but a few changes consistently help:

• Show shipping costs, taxes, and any fees on the product or cart page, not for the first time at the final checkout step.
• Offer guest checkout by default instead of requiring an account.
• Cut checkout forms down to the fields you genuinely need.
• Support more than one payment method, including at least one digital wallet option.
• Improve mobile page speed, since that is where the highest abandonment usually shows up.
• Run an abandoned cart email or SMS sequence to recover shoppers who leave anyway.

That last point deserves its own guide. For a full breakdown of recovery tactics and timing, see how to reduce cart abandonment, and for the setup mechanics, abandoned cart email automation walks through it step by step.

Cart abandonment rate tells a misleading story if you look at it alone. A few related metrics round out the picture:

• Cart conversion rate, the mirror image of abandonment, tells you the share of carts that did convert.
• Checkout abandonment rate isolates drop-off after checkout has started, pointing more directly at payment or form friction.
• Abandoned cart recovery rate measures how much of that lost revenue you actually win back through email, SMS, or retargeting.
• Average order value matters because a lower abandonment rate driven by heavy discounting can quietly hurt your margins even while the metric looks better.

• Cart abandonment rate measures everyone who added an item and never bought, which is broader than the narrower checkout abandonment rate.
• Use the formula (1 − completed purchases ÷ carts created) × 100, and keep the timeframe and cart definition consistent every time.
• Reported averages vary by source because they measure different things, so treat the roughly 70% global average as a reference point, not a fixed target.
• Fashion and luxury run well above the average, groceries and everyday goods run well below it, and mobile abandons more than desktop across almost every category.
• Late-appearing costs are the single biggest driver, followed by forced account creation and long checkout forms.
• Inconsistent tracking, not just poor checkout design, is a common reason the number looks worse or better than it should.
• Fixing checkout friction and running a recovery flow both lower the rate, but they solve different problems.
• Pair cart abandonment rate with conversion rate, recovery rate, and average order value instead of reading it in isolation.

Cart abandonment rate is not a metric to chase down to zero, it is a diagnostic tool. Get your measurement consistent, compare it to your actual category instead of a generic global figure, and use the gap to decide whether you have a checkout problem or a recovery problem. If a meaningful share of your abandoned carts are shoppers who simply need a nudge to come back, Adflipr’s abandoned cart recovery tools can automate that follow-up so those carts do not just sit there unrecovered.