Add-to-Cart Rate

Add-to-cart rate measures how often a visit turns into a cart. Out of every hundred sessions on your store, it tells you how many included at least one add-to-cart action. Shopify records the event when the button is pressed, so the figure reflects interest in a product and the clarity of the page that sells it.

It is not a purchase measure. A cart can sit untouched, be abandoned at shipping, or never reach checkout at all, and the add-to-cart rate stays the same. People often confuse it with Conversion Rate, which counts completed orders, and with Cart Abandonment Rate, which counts what happens after the cart exists.

Divide sessions containing an add-to-cart event by total sessions, then multiply by a hundred. The denominator is the decision. Total store sessions is the honest one: it includes people who landed on your blog or homepage and never reached a product. Product page sessions is the flattering one, because it strips out everyone who never saw a buy button. Neither is wrong, but a rate that jumped overnight is usually a denominator change, not a shopper change. Label which you used.

Conversion Rate sits downstream and counts orders rather than carts. Cart Abandonment Rate picks up where this metric stops, measuring carts that never became orders. AOV tells you what those carts were worth. If you are testing a product page to move this number, A/B Test and Primary Metric are the terms that describe the work.