Cart abandonment rate: what's normal, and how to read yours

How do you calculate cart abandonment rate?

Divide the carts that turned into an order by all carts, and take that away from 1. If 1,000 shoppers added to cart and 300 of them ordered, your rate is 1 − 300 ÷ 1,000 = 70%.

The hard part is deciding when a cart counts as lost. Counting only orders placed in the same visit, these stores lost 80% of carts. Giving shoppers three days, it was 70%: about 1 in 8 shoppers who left without ordering came back and bought.

That 1 in 8 is a floor. A shopper who comes back on another device, or in another browser after tapping an ad inside Instagram or Facebook, looks like a new person and isn't counted.

Those who did come back mostly came back fast: 70% within a day.

We can't tell how many came back on their own and how many were brought back by a reminder email or an ad. Either way, the first day is when a lost cart is most likely to come back.

What's a normal cart abandonment rate?

Around 70% is the number you'll see most. The Baymard Institute's average of 50 published studies is about 70%, but those studies count abandonment in different ways, so treat any average as rough.

Single stores vary more than the averages suggest. On the three stores here with at least 200 carts, the rate ran from 63% to 79%. The five together came out at 70%, but two stores make up 95% of the carts, so that total mostly reflects those two.

So compare your store with itself over time, not with an average. A drop from 75% to 70% after you fix something tells you more than whether 70% counts as "good".

Do phone shoppers abandon more?

Not by much on these stores. 84% of carts were started on a phone, and phone and computer carts were abandoned at about the same rate: 70% and 68%.

Phone shoppers are also the ones most likely to finish on another device, which this count misses, so the phone number may be a little high. Either way, the phone is where most carts are, so it's where any problem costs the most.

Five things to check first

1. Show the full price early. In Baymard's survey of shoppers who left during checkout, about 4 in 10 named extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees), the most common reason. Show shipping on the product page or in the cart, not for the first time at checkout.
2. Send the reminder within a day. 70% of the shoppers who came back did it in the first 24 hours.
3. Make the way back short. A reminder should open the cart with the items still in it, signed in if possible, not your home page.
4. Buy something on your own phone. Use mobile data, start on a product page, and pay. Shoppers who ordered in the same visit usually finished within about 6 minutes of their first add to cart. Write down every place you slowed down.
5. Change one thing at a time. Sales, paydays and holidays move this number. Compare at least a full week before with a full week after.

How we measured this

• 8,205 visits with an add to cart, from Shopify's add-to-cart event, on five Shopify stores that use Harvv. One store's data starts Oct 14; the other four start Oct 26 to 30, so most carts are from the last week of October, before Halloween and Black Friday. The stores aren't named.
• Each cart was followed for 3 full days. An order counts when the store's order confirmation fired in the same browser.
• Bots and the stores' own staff visits were removed. 19% of add-to-cart visits had no matching visit record and were left out.
• These are visits, not people. Counted once per shopper instead (6,260 shoppers), the rate was 73%.
• For the one store we could follow for a full week, waiting 7 days instead of 3 moved its order rate from 21.5% to 22.3% on the same 2,208 carts.
• Tablets (192 carts) are in the totals but too few to show on their own.