Checkout Abandonment Rate Calculator

Written out

Checkout abandonment rate is the share of initiated checkouts that do not complete: 1 − (orders ÷ checkouts started) × 100.

It measures the people who had decided to buy, which makes it a far better diagnostic than cart abandonment. Everyone in the denominator demonstrated purchase intent.

Typical rates run 20% to 30% against cart abandonment's 70%, and the two are frequently confused in benchmarking.

Running the numbers

1,333 checkouts started producing 1,000 orders is a 25% checkout abandonment rate.

Those 333 abandonments represent $19,300 of revenue and $10,600 of contribution monthly. Unlike cart abandonment, most of this is genuinely recoverable, because these people were trying to buy.

Reducing the rate from 25% to 18% recovers 93 orders, $5,394 of revenue and $2,967 of contribution a month, from changes to a process rather than any spend.

That is the highest-yield square foot of most ecommerce sites, and it is usually the least examined.

What gets missed

Checkout definitions vary between platforms, some count reaching the shipping page, others entering payment details, so the figure is not comparable across businesses or even across analytics setups.

Payment failures also count as abandonments in most implementations, and a declined card is an entirely different problem from a customer changing their mind.

What to do next

Instrument the checkout step by step and look at the drop-off between each. The aggregate rate says there is a problem; the step data says where it is.

Then separate payment failures from voluntary abandonment. Failed payments are an operational issue with fixes: better retry logic, more payment methods, clearer error messages, that have nothing to do with the checkout design.

Where the drop-off usually concentrates

In most instrumented checkouts the largest single drop is at the point shipping cost first appears, followed by account creation and then payment entry.

Each has a straightforward remedy: show shipping earlier or build it into the price, offer guest checkout, and support the payment methods your customers actually use including wallets that skip form entry entirely.

Express wallet checkout is particularly effective on mobile, where form filling is the dominant friction. Adding it typically lifts mobile checkout completion by several points, which on the example store is worth more than any redesign of the pages themselves.

Trust signals at the payment step measurably reduce abandonment, particularly for businesses customers have not bought from before, security badges, a visible returns policy and a contact route all contribute.

Their effect is largest exactly where it matters most, on first-time buyers, and they cost nothing beyond the space they occupy on the page.

Progress indicators help on multi-step checkouts by making the remaining effort visible, since uncertainty about how much is left is itself a reason people give up partway.

Offering a saved-cart or email-my-basket option gives an exit route that preserves the order rather than losing it, and it converts a share of the people who genuinely intended to return.

Checkout abandonment and cart abandonment measure different stages and the distinction matters for what you fix. Cart abandonment includes everyone who added an item and left, most of whom were browsing. Checkout abandonment counts only those who began the checkout process, which is a far stronger signal of intent, and a high figure there points at the checkout itself rather than at the product.