Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is the share of shoppers who add something to their cart but leave your store without completing the purchase.

What it means

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of carts created on your store that never turn into a paid order. A shopper adds a product, then closes the tab, gets distracted, balks at shipping costs or simply keeps browsing elsewhere. The cart sits there unpaid, and that cart counts as abandoned once your reporting window closes.

It is not checkout abandonment, which only counts people who got as far as entering the checkout flow, and it is not the inverse of your Conversion Rate, which is measured against all sessions rather than carts. Shopify's own abandoned checkout reports use the narrower checkout figure, so the two numbers rarely match.

How it is measured

Take the number of carts created in a period, subtract completed orders from those carts, divide by carts created, then multiply by 100. Carts created is the honest denominator: it counts every shopper who signalled intent. Checkouts started is the flattering one, because it excludes everyone who added to cart and never clicked through, which is usually the largest group. Both are legitimate measures, but label which one you used, and keep the definition fixed so month-to-month comparisons mean something.

A Shopify example

  • For Fernhill Ceramics, a small homeware store

    Worked example

    In March, Fernhill Ceramics had 4,200 carts created and 630 of those carts became paid orders. That leaves 3,570 abandoned carts, so 3,570 divided by 4,200 is 85% cart abandonment. Only 1,400 shoppers reached the checkout page, so measured against checkouts started the same month reads as 55% abandonment. Same store, same March, thirty points apart depending on the denominator.

See this on your own store

Paste your store URL. The audit takes about a minute, costs nothing, and ends with a welcome flow you can read before anything is sent.