The short answer
Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds something to their cart and leaves without buying. It’s normal: across the studies Baymard collects, the average documented abandonment rate is about 70% (Baymard Institute).
But not all abandonment is a problem. Many shoppers use the cart as a wishlist or a price check. The fixable part is the shoppers who wanted to buy and were stopped by something on your site.
How to measure it
cart abandonment rate = 1 − (orders ÷ carts created)
Example: 2,400 sessions added to cart this week and 720 ordered. 720 ÷ 2,400 = 0.30, so the abandonment rate is 70%.
Fix the definition before you compare anything:
- Sessions or users? One shopper can create carts in several sessions. User-based rates are usually lower.
- Which period? Some shoppers come back days later to buy. A same-session rate looks worse than a 7-day one.
- Which carts? Exclude bots and internal testing.
Then split it: by device, new versus returning, traffic source and product category. The overall rate hides where the problem is.
Why shoppers leave
When shoppers who weren’t just browsing were asked why they abandoned, the most common answers in Baymard’s US survey were (Baymard Institute):
| Reason | Share of abandoners |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) | 40% |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% |
| Didn’t trust the site with card details | 19% |
| Had to create an account | 18% |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% |
| Couldn’t see the total cost up front | 12% |
These are self-reported reasons from a broad panel. They tell you where to look, not what’s true for your shop.
Find your own causes
- Funnel by step. Where between cart and order do people leave? See funnel analysis.
- Recordings of that step. Watch 20 to 30 sessions. Look for scrolling back, hesitation, errors.
- One-question exit survey on the cart or checkout: “What stopped you from ordering today?”
- Support and chat logs. Pre-purchase questions are abandonment reasons in disguise.
Fixes, from cheapest to biggest
- Show total cost early: delivery cost or threshold on product pages and in the cart.
- Show delivery dates, not just delivery names.
- Offer guest checkout and ask for an account after the order.
- Cut form fields to what’s needed to fulfil the order.
- Make the payment step look as secure as it is, with familiar payment options.
- Keep the cart easy to edit and the path to checkout obvious on mobile.
Bugs (broken promo codes, errors that wipe the form) don’t need a test. Fix them. Bigger changes, like a new checkout flow, should be tested with completed orders as the primary metric (Kohavi, Tang and Xu, 2020).
Reminder emails, done right
Abandoned cart emails can recover some orders, but they come after the problem. If you send them:
- Get consent where the law requires it and respect unsubscribes.
- Show the cart and answer the common questions (delivery, returns).
- Don’t invent urgency (“your cart expires in 10 minutes!”) or discount by default, which teaches shoppers to abandon on purpose.
What to do next
Run the checkout checklist on your own site, then read checkout optimization for the full method.