Cart abandonment: why seven in ten carts are left, and the fixes that recover them

The short answer

The average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, calculated by the Baymard Institute from 50 studies (last updated 22 September 2025). That means for every ten carts created, about three become orders. The individual studies range from 55% to 84.27%, and they define abandonment differently, so treat 70% as the order of magnitude rather than a precise target.

What is cart abandonment, and how is it different from checkout abandonment?

Cart abandonment is a shopper adding at least one item to the cart and leaving without completing an order. Checkout abandonment is narrower: the shopper started the checkout, entering an email or address, and then left. Checkout abandonment is the more useful number, because those shoppers had real intent.

The distinction matters when you plan fixes. A cart can be a wish list, a price check or a way to see the delivery cost. A started checkout is a buyer who ran into something. Your analytics funnel should show both: carts created, checkouts started and orders completed.

What is the average cart abandonment rate?

The average documented cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, across 50 studies collected by the Baymard Institute between 2006 and 2025. The figure is a meta-average, so it mixes definitions, and some studies count "just browsing" carts that were never meant to become orders.

Is your own rate good or bad? Compare it with your own history first. A store whose abandonment rises from 68% to 75% after a change to delivery pricing has learned something specific. A store at 72% that has never changed anything has learned only that it is average. For the store-wide number that abandonment feeds into, see the average ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks.

How do you calculate cart abandonment rate?

Divide completed orders by carts created in the same period, subtract the result from 1 and multiply by 100. A store with 1,000 carts and 300 orders in a month has a cart abandonment rate of 70%. Use carts, not sessions, as the denominator, or you are measuring something else.

A worked example:

• Carts created in October: 1,000.
• Orders completed in October: 300.
• Cart abandonment rate: (1 minus 300 / 1,000) x 100 = 70%.
• Checkouts started: 520. Checkout abandonment rate: (1 minus 300 / 520) x 100 = 42%.

The second number is the one to watch. In this example, 480 carts were never taken to checkout, which is often a price or delivery question. The 220 checkouts that did not finish are the ones a better checkout can win back.

Why do shoppers abandon their carts?

The most common avoidable reason is extra costs appearing late: 40% of US shoppers who abandoned a checkout said shipping, tax or fees were too high. Slow delivery (20%), not trusting the site with a card (19%) and forced account creation (18%) follow. Separately, 42% of US shoppers say they have abandoned because they were just browsing.

Three readings of the chart:

1. Cost is a communication problem as much as a price problem. "Extra costs too high" (40%) and "could not see total cost upfront" (12%) both point at the same fix: show delivery cost and free delivery thresholds on the product page, not on the last step.
2. Several reasons are technical. Website errors or crashes (17%) and a long or complicated checkout (17%) can be tested before a sale, not discovered during one.
3. Trust is earned before checkout. The 19% who did not trust the site with their card made that judgement from the pages they saw on the way in: product pages, reviews, returns policy and payment marks.

Shoppers could choose more than one answer, so the percentages add to more than 100. The survey covers US online shoppers; we found no equivalent Australian study with a published method.

Why is cart abandonment worse on mobile?

Phones bring most shopping traffic but convert it less well, because small screens make forms, costs and payment harder. Littledata's Shopify benchmark shows an average 1.2% conversion rate on mobile against 1.9% on desktop. Baymard publishes no mobile-specific abandonment rate, so the gap shows up in conversion data instead.

The pressure is growing, not easing:

• Most orders are now mobile. 70% of global Cyber Week 2025 online orders came from mobile devices, on Salesforce's commerce data (Salesforce, December 2025). Salesforce's sample is its own platform.
• Mobile converts worse on typical stores. 1.2% on mobile against 1.9% on desktop across 2,800 Shopify stores (Littledata, 2023 data).
• Most sites are slower on phones. Only 48% of websites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 56% on desktop (HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025).
• Speed and conversion move together. A 0.1 second faster mobile site was associated with 8.4% more retail conversions in a Google-commissioned Deloitte study of 37 brands (Deloitte, 2020). It is old and correlational.

The practical point: test every cart and checkout change on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not only on the office desktop. Express wallets, which fill in card and address details in one tap, remove the part of mobile checkout people like least.

Which fixes recover the most abandoned carts?

The fixes that recover the most carts are the ones that remove a surprise: show delivery costs early, allow guest checkout, add the payment methods shoppers expect and cut fields. Recovery emails come after those, because they win back shoppers the checkout already lost. The table ranks fixes against Baymard's reasons.

On payment methods: Adobe reported USD 20 billion of buy now pay later spending in the 2025 US holiday season, with 82.2% of it on mobile (Adobe, January 2026). If your buyers are young, mobile and buying gifts, missing that option is a real gap. If they are businesses buying on account, it is not.

For fixes that apply beyond the cart, such as speed, clarity and trust on the whole site, see how to increase your website conversion rate.

How much can a better checkout recover?

Baymard estimates the average large ecommerce site could increase its conversion rate by 35.26% through better checkout design alone. That is a modelled potential from Baymard's usability benchmarks, not an average uplift that stores have measured. Use it as a ceiling for planning, never as a promise.

In Baymard's words, "the average large-sized ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate" through better checkout design. Baymard also sizes the prize at USD 260 billion of recoverable orders across US and EU ecommerce, and finds the average US checkout has 23.48 form elements against an ideal of 12 to 14 (Baymard Institute).

Baymard sells checkout research, so it has an interest in the size of this number. It is still the most carefully built estimate in the field, and it comes with its method published.

What that means for one store, worked through

Illustrative figures, labelled as invented. Put yours in.

• A store has 1,000 carts a month and converts 29.78% of them (the inverse of the 70.22% average): 298 orders.
• If better checkout design delivered the full 35.26% modelled lift, orders would rise to about 403.
• At an average order value of AUD 110, the extra 105 orders are worth about AUD 11,550 a month.
• If you achieve a third of Baymard's modelled lift, which is a more cautious planning figure, the gain is about 35 orders, or AUD 3,850 a month.

Present the range, not the top number. The top of the range assumes your checkout is as poor as the average large site in Baymard's benchmark, and yours may already be better.

Do abandoned cart emails work?

Abandoned cart emails can recover some orders, but they are the last line, not the first. They only reach shoppers who left an email address, and they work best on the shoppers who were interrupted or comparing prices. They do not fix the costs, delivery dates or errors that made the others leave.

We do not quote a recovery rate for cart emails. The figures in circulation come from email platforms that sell the feature, usually without a published sample, and they vary widely. Measure your own: sessions that came from the reminder email, and orders from those sessions, over a full month.

If you run a sale, the reminder email is also a landing page problem. The email promises a product and a price; the page it links to must show both. The Black Friday landing page checklist covers this in check 12.

What PostCliq checks, and what it does not

PostCliq recognises online stores and checks the public pages a shopper sees before the cart: product and landing pages, for speed on mobile and desktop, trust signals, accessibility, search access and content clarity. Those are the pages where the delivery-cost and trust problems in the chart start.

It does not add products to a cart, log in, submit forms or go through checkout. So it does not measure your cart abandonment rate or test your checkout. Your analytics funnel, session recordings and a real test order on a phone do that. PostCliq's role is the pages before the cart, and a weekly re-audit to check that fixes on those pages held. The detail is in the methodology behind PostCliq's checks.

What to do next

1. Pull carts created, checkouts started and orders completed for the last three months. Work out both abandonment rates.
2. Open a product page on your phone and find the delivery cost. If it takes more than one tap, fix that first.
3. Place a guest order on a phone with a real card. Count the form fields you had to fill in.
4. Add trust and returns information beside the buy button on your top ten product pages.
5. Run a free PostCliq audit of your store's product pages for speed, trust and clarity problems before the cart.
6. Read the ecommerce conversion rate guide to see what the cart fixes are worth store-wide.

More in the ecommerce conversion hub.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good cart abandonment rate?

A good cart abandonment rate is one lower than your own last year. The documented average is 70.22% across 50 studies collected by Baymard Institute, with individual studies ranging from 55% to 84.27%. A rate well above 80% usually points at a specific problem, such as costs revealed late or a broken mobile checkout, and is worth investigating first.

How do you calculate cart abandonment rate?

Divide completed orders by carts created in the same period, subtract the result from 1 and multiply by 100. For example, 300 orders from 1,000 carts is a 70% abandonment rate. Track checkout abandonment too: orders divided by checkouts started. It shows how many shoppers with real intent the checkout itself is losing.

What is the main reason for cart abandonment?

Extra costs are the main avoidable reason. In Baymard Institute's survey of US shoppers, 40% of those who abandoned a checkout said shipping, tax or fees were too high, excluding shoppers who were just browsing. Slow delivery (20%), not trusting the site with a card (19%) and being forced to create an account (18%) follow.

How do you reduce cart abandonment?

Show delivery costs and thresholds on product pages, offer guest checkout, put payment security and returns information near the buy button, cut checkout fields and test the checkout on real phones. Then add reminder emails for shoppers who left an email address. Fix the causes first; reminder emails only win back part of what the causes lose.

Does buy now pay later reduce cart abandonment?

It can, where your buyers use it. Baymard found 9% of US shoppers abandoned a checkout because of too few payment methods, and Adobe reported USD 20 billion of buy now pay later spending in the 2025 US holiday season, 82.2% on mobile. If your buyers are consumers shopping on phones, offering it removes a reason to leave.

Can PostCliq measure my cart abandonment rate?

No. PostCliq reads a store's public pages and never adds to cart, logs in or goes through checkout, so it does not measure cart abandonment or test checkout. It checks the product and landing pages before the cart for speed, trust signals, search access, accessibility and content clarity. Use your analytics funnel for the abandonment rate itself.