eCommerce guide
Cart abandonment rate: how to measure it and bring it down
Cart abandonment rate is the share of shopping carts that never become orders. This guide gives the formula with a worked example, explains the difference between cart and checkout abandonment, shows how to measure each step in GA4, and sets out the fixes that most often win buyers back.
Short answer
Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of online shopping carts that shoppers create but never turn into a completed order. To calculate it, divide completed orders by carts created, subtract the result from one and multiply by 100. Baymard Institute's average of published studies puts it at 70.22%, on a page last updated September 22, 2025.
- Checkout abandonment rate counts only shoppers who start checkout, so it points more directly at checkout problems.
- Take orders and carts from the same tool for the same dates.
- A GA4 funnel exploration split by device shows the step that loses the most shoppers.
- Extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees top Baymard's list of reasons a store can fix.
- Show the full cost and a delivery date before checkout, allow guest checkout and cut form fields you do not need.
What is cart abandonment rate?
Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of online shopping carts that shoppers create but never turn into a completed order. It measures how many people who showed enough interest to add a product then left without paying. It is one of the clearest signs of where an online store loses revenue it had almost won.
Not every abandoned cart is a lost sale. Many shoppers use the cart as a wish list, a price calculator or a way to compare stores. The work is to find the abandonment your store causes, and fix that.
How to calculate cart abandonment rate
To calculate cart abandonment rate, divide the number of completed orders by the number of carts created, subtract the result from one, and multiply by 100. Take both numbers from the same tool for the same dates, so they are counted the same way.
Cart abandonment rate = (1 - completed orders / carts created) x 100
Worked example: in one week, shoppers create 500 carts and 180 of them become orders. 180 / 500 = 0.36. 1 - 0.36 = 0.64. Multiply by 100 and the cart abandonment rate is 64%.
Most stores cannot count carts directly, so analytics stands in for them. In Google Analytics 4, use sessions with an add_to_cart event for carts created and sessions with a purchase event for completed orders. The conversion rate calculator does the division for you: enter orders as conversions and carts as visitors, and subtract the result from 100%.
Cart abandonment rate vs checkout abandonment rate
Cart abandonment rate counts every cart that does not become an order. Checkout abandonment rate counts only shoppers who start checkout and then leave. The second number is smaller and more useful, because those shoppers had decided to buy and something in the checkout stopped them.
| Rate | Formula | What it points to |
|---|---|---|
| Cart abandonment | 1 - orders / carts created | Everything after add to cart: costs, trust, intent, the cart page itself |
| Checkout abandonment | 1 - orders / checkouts started | The checkout: forms, account creation, delivery options, payment |
| Payment abandonment | 1 - orders / payment steps reached | Payment methods, declined cards, trust at the moment of paying |
Track all three. If cart abandonment is high but checkout abandonment is low, the problem sits on the cart page or in the costs shown there. If checkout abandonment is high, the checkout itself is the place to look.
What is the average cart abandonment rate?
The most cited figure comes from Baymard Institute, which keeps a list of 50 published studies of online shopping cart abandonment and calculates their average. On its cart abandonment rate statistics page, last updated September 22, 2025, that average is 70.22%.
Read that number for what it is: an average of studies from different years, vendors, store types and measurement methods. It tells you that most carts are abandoned on most stores, so a high rate on yours is normal rather than a crisis. It does not tell you what your store should achieve. Your own rate, tracked over time by device and traffic source, is the benchmark that matters. For more figures checked against their original sources, see these conversion rate optimization stats.
Baymard also makes a point worth keeping: a large share of abandonment comes from people who were only browsing, comparing prices or saving items for later. That share cannot be designed away. The rest can.
How to measure cart abandonment step by step in GA4
To see where shoppers leave, build a funnel exploration in Google Analytics 4 that follows the standard ecommerce events from viewing a product to buying it. Each step shows how many sessions moved on and how many dropped out, and you can split the whole funnel by device and traffic source.
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Check your ecommerce events
Make sure your store sends
view_item,add_to_cart,begin_checkout,add_shipping_info,add_payment_infoandpurchase. Most store platforms and plugins can send these. -
Create a funnel exploration
In GA4, go to Explore and choose the funnel exploration template. Add one step per event, in the order a shopper meets them.
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Break it down by device
Add device category as a breakdown. A checkout that loses far more phone shoppers than desktop shoppers at the same step has a mobile problem.
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Find the biggest drop
Look for the step that loses the most shoppers relative to the others. That is where to start looking for causes, with session recordings and a test order of your own.
Why do shoppers abandon their carts?
Shoppers abandon carts for two kinds of reasons. Some were never ready to buy: they were browsing, comparing or saving items. Others wanted to buy and the store put something in their way. In Baymard Institute's survey of US online shoppers, extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees top the list of reasons a store can fix.
- Extra costs shown late. Shipping, tax or fees that appear only at the last step.
- Slow or unclear delivery. No delivery date, or a date that is too late.
- Low trust. A shopper is not sure the site is safe to give card details to.
- Forced account creation. Having to register before paying.
- A long or confusing checkout. Too many fields, steps or decisions.
- Errors. Validation messages that do not say what is wrong, or a page that breaks.
- Returns policy. Unclear, costly or hard to find.
- Payment. A preferred method missing, or a card declined.
Your store will have its own order of causes. Find it with a test order on a phone, session recordings of shoppers who left at your weakest step, and a one-question exit poll on the cart page asking what stopped them.
How to reduce cart abandonment rate
To reduce cart abandonment rate, show the full cost and delivery date before the checkout, let people buy as a guest, cut every form field you do not need, offer the payment methods your customers use, place trust and returns information next to the pay button, and fix errors. Then test the changes you are unsure of.
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Show the total early
Put shipping cost, or a shipping estimate, on the product page and in the cart. If you have a free shipping threshold, show how far the cart is from it.
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Show when it will arrive
A delivery date is easier to judge than a number of working days. Show it before checkout, not after payment.
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Let people check out as a guest
Offer account creation after the order is placed, with the details already filled in.
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Cut the form down
Remove fields you do not need to fulfil the order, use address lookup and autofill, and set the right keyboard for each field on mobile. The guide to reducing form abandonment covers this in detail.
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Offer the payment methods your customers use
Check which wallets and local methods your customers expect, especially on mobile, where typing card numbers is slow.
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Put reassurance next to the decision
Returns policy, security information and reviews belong near the pay button, not only in the footer.
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Make errors easy to fix
Validate fields as people type, say exactly what is wrong, and never clear a form when one field fails.
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Save the cart and follow up
Keep carts when people return, and send a reminder email to shoppers who gave their address. Judge recovery emails on recovered orders, net of any discount you offer.
Two of Convertica's published tests touch the cart directly. Shipping and refund policy badges on a cart page, each opening a short pop-up, raised the desktop rate of order completion 21.8% at 97% confidence, with no significant change on mobile; the case study does not state the test length. A product page message showing how close the cart was to free shipping also lifted desktop results. Read the policy visibility case study and the free shipping threshold case study.
Fix clear breakages straight away. For bigger changes, such as a one-page checkout or a new shipping offer, run an A/B test and judge it on revenue per visitor, not on cart abandonment alone: a free shipping offer that lowers abandonment but also lowers order value may not help. The A/B test sample size calculator shows whether your traffic is enough for a reliable test, and the statistical significance calculator reads the result.
Cart abandonment and AI shopping agents
Some AI assistants can now browse a store and take steps for the person they work for. They meet the same obstacles shoppers do, plus a few of their own. An agent reading your page's HTML may not see a price, shipping cost or returns policy that only appears after a script runs, and it may stop at steps built only for a person with a mouse.
The fixes overlap with the ones above: state total costs, delivery times and the returns policy in plain text on the page, keep structured data accurate, and avoid checkout steps that only a human can pass. This is a new area and nobody has years of data on it yet. Agent readiness is one of the eight checks in Convertica's free CRO audit.
Cart abandonment rate questions
What is cart abandonment rate?
Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of shopping carts that are created but never turned into a completed order. If shoppers create 500 carts in a week and 180 of them become orders, the other 320 were abandoned, a cart abandonment rate of 64%.
How do you calculate cart abandonment rate?
Cart abandonment rate = (1 - completed orders / carts created) x 100. Count both numbers over the same dates and from the same tool. In GA4, the number of sessions with an add_to_cart event stands in for carts created, and sessions with a purchase event for completed orders.
What is the average cart abandonment rate?
Baymard Institute keeps a list of 50 published studies of online cart abandonment and calculates their average at 70.22% (list last updated September 22, 2025). The studies use different methods, years and stores, so treat the figure as a sign that most carts are abandoned everywhere, not as a target for your store.
What is a good cart abandonment rate?
A good cart abandonment rate is one that is lower than your own last comparable period, for the same devices and traffic sources, without a fall in average order value. Some abandonment can never be removed, because many shoppers use the cart to save items or compare prices, so aim to reduce it, not to reach zero.
What is the difference between cart abandonment and checkout abandonment?
Cart abandonment counts every cart that does not become an order, including shoppers who never start checkout. Checkout abandonment counts only shoppers who start checkout and then leave. Checkout abandonment is the narrower, more fixable number, because those shoppers had already decided to buy.
Why do shoppers abandon their carts?
Many shoppers abandon a cart because they were only browsing, comparing or saving items. Among the reasons a store can fix, Baymard Institute's survey of US online shoppers puts extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees first, followed by slow delivery, low trust in the site, forced account creation and a long or confusing checkout.
Do abandoned cart emails work?
Abandoned cart emails can win back some shoppers who left for reasons outside the store's control, such as being interrupted. They cannot fix the reasons the checkout itself creates, such as surprise costs. Measure recovered orders against the discounts you give, and fix the checkout first so fewer carts need recovering.