Cart Abandonment Rate Calculator

The calculation itself

Cart abandonment rate is the share of carts created that do not become orders: 1 − (orders ÷ carts created) × 100.

It is distinct from checkout abandonment, which measures only the people who began the checkout process. Cart abandonment includes everyone who added an item and left.

Published benchmarks around 70% are almost all cart abandonment, and comparing your checkout figure against them will look alarmingly good.

An example

3,333 carts created producing 1,000 orders is a 70% cart abandonment rate, squarely at the benchmark.

Those 2,333 abandoned carts represent $135,300 of potential revenue, of which recovering even 10% would be $13,530 a month and $7,442 of contribution.

But most of that is not recoverable. A large share of cart additions are browsing behaviour: using the cart as a wishlist, comparing prices, checking shipping cost, rather than an interrupted purchase.

The recoverable portion is concentrated among people who reached checkout and stopped, which is why the checkout abandonment figure is the more actionable one.

Where the figure deceives

A 70% rate sounds like a crisis and is close to universal, which suggests it reflects how people shop rather than a fault in the site.

The rate also rises with traffic quality falling, so a business running broad prospecting will see cart abandonment worsen while the campaign is performing exactly as intended.

Acting on it

Separate cart abandonment from checkout abandonment and work on the second, where intent is demonstrably high and the causes are specific and fixable.

Then look at where in the process people leave rather than at the aggregate rate. The step-level drop-off is what identifies the problem; the overall percentage merely confirms one exists.

What actually causes abandonment

Surveys consistently find the same leading causes: unexpected extra costs at checkout, being required to create an account, a long or confusing process, and concerns about payment security.

The first is by some distance the largest, and it is the one most directly fixable: showing shipping cost early, before the customer has invested effort, removes the surprise that causes the exit.

Guest checkout addresses the second and costs nothing but the account signups that would have been coerced rather than chosen. Both changes are configuration rather than development, and between them they usually recover more than any recovery email sequence does, which is the more useful order to work in.

Benchmarks are worth treating cautiously here, since published figures blend industries with very different purchase considerations and the definition of a cart varies between platforms.

Tracking your own rate over time against your own history is considerably more useful than any comparison against a category average that may not describe your business at all.

Guest checkout removes one of the most frequently cited reasons for abandonment and costs only the accounts that would have been created reluctantly, which were rarely worth much anyway.

Displaying delivery cost on the product page removes the most common cause entirely, and it costs only the visitors who would have abandoned later anyway.

The published benchmark of roughly 70% is quoted constantly and is worth treating carefully, since it averages across categories, devices and traffic types that behave nothing alike. A store comparing its own figure against that number learns very little. Comparing this month against last month, for the same traffic mix, tells you something real.