An abandoned cart in e-commerce occurs when a shopper adds items to their online cart or starts the checkout process, but leaves the site before completing the purchase. In other words, the cart is created, but no order is placed, resulting in a missed sale and potential lost revenue.
What is an abandoned cart?
In e-commerce, an abandoned cart occurs when a potential customer selects products, adds them to a virtual shopping cart, and then exits the site or app without completing the purchase. This behaviour is common across online stores and is tracked as a key performance indicator because it shows how many high‑intent shoppers drop out at the final steps.
Abandoned carts can occur at different stages: some users leave after adding just a few items, while others abandon their carts during checkout when they are asked to provide shipping details or payment information. In all cases, the items remain in the cart but are never converted into a completed transaction.
How the cart abandonment rate is calculated
The cart abandonment rate measures the percentage of shopping carts that do not result in a purchase.
For example, if 1,000 carts are created and only 250 result in orders, 750 are abandoned, and the cart abandonment rate is 75%. Many benchmarks indicate global averages in the 70% range, meaning that roughly 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.
Why shoppers abandon online carts
Research from Baymard Institute, Statista, and other analytics providers points to a cluster of recurring reasons behind high cart abandonment rates. Top issues include:
- Extra costs like shipping, tax, and fees being too high at checkout, cited by around 39–48% of surveyed shoppers.
- Shoppers are leaving to look for better deals elsewhere or wait for an item to go on sale, with about 19–30% comparing prices across sites.
- Complicated or lengthy checkout flows, account‑creation requirements, or technical issues such as slow pages and errors.
- Lack of trust in payment security or unclear return and shipping policies, which causes roughly 23–25% of shoppers in some surveys to abandon.
Why abandoned carts matter for online retailers
Cart abandonment directly affects conversion rate and revenue, since every abandoned order represents a shopper who was interested enough to start buying but did not finish. Analysts estimate that between the U.S. and EU, abandoned carts represent more than $260 billion in recoverable orders, underscoring the financial impact for e‑commerce brands of all sizes.
Because these shoppers have already shown intent, many businesses treat abandoned carts as “warm” leads. Tracking abandonment by device, traffic source, and checkout step helps retailers find friction points in their funnel, from hidden fees to poor mobile UX, and prioritize fixes that can unlock incremental sales.
Common abandoned cart recovery tactics
To recover some of this lost revenue, brands use targeted abandoned cart campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications, and ads. These messages usually remind customers of the items left in their cart and may include incentives like limited‑time discounts or free shipping to encourage completion.
Other high‑impact tactics include simplifying checkout with options like one‑click buying, offering multiple payment methods, showing total costs upfront, and clearly communicating returns and delivery times. Some studies suggest that recovering even 10–20% of abandoned carts is considered a strong performance benchmark for many online retailers.
