- 70.22% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before purchase, according to (Baymard Institute).
- $18 billion in sales revenue is lost globally each year due to cart abandonment.
- 48% of shoppers cite unexpected extra costs — shipping fees, taxes — as their primary reason for leaving.
- 35.26% conversion rate improvement is available to the average large ecommerce site through checkout design fixes alone.
- 80.2% cart abandonment rate on mobile devices versus 71.8% on desktop — your mobile checkout deserves separate attention.
- $4.75 in paid acquisition cost is lost every time a visitor abandons a cart, before you count the lost sale itself.
What is the true scale of cart abandonment in ecommerce today?
Cart abandonment is the act of a shopper adding one or more products to an online cart and then leaving the site without completing the purchase. Seven out of every ten shoppers do exactly that. According to (Baymard Institute), the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22% — a figure compiled from dozens of published studies and widely cited as the industry baseline.
Your cart abandonment rate is calculated as: 1 minus (completed transactions divided by initiated carts), expressed as a percentage. If 1,000 shoppers add items to a cart and 297 complete checkout, your abandonment rate is 70.3%. That formula is the same whether you pull it from Google Analytics, Shopify's native reports, or any third-party analytics platform.
The device split makes the number worse than the headline suggests. Mobile users have a cart abandonment rate of 80.2%, according to (Contentsquare), compared to 71.8% on desktop. Given that mobile traffic now accounts for the majority of ecommerce visits, your blended abandonment rate is being pulled upward by your phone experience every single day.
Why are shoppers abandoning their carts? The top reasons revealed
Unexpected extra costs are the single largest driver of abandonment. According to (Contentsquare), 48% of US customers cite unexpected costs — shipping fees, taxes, mandatory add-ons — as their primary reason for not completing a purchase. A February 2024 survey confirmed this remains the top reason US adults abandon checkout, according to (eMarketer).
42% of US online shoppers abandon a cart simply because they were browsing or not ready to buy — that cohort is largely unrecoverable at the moment of abandonment, but retargeting can reach them later. The next recoverable group is the 17% who leave because the checkout process is too long or complicated, and the 21% who leave because delivery is too slow, according to (Baymard Institute).
Payment friction is a quieter leak. 13% of customers abandon if their preferred payment method is unavailable, according to (Contentsquare). A separate figure from Baymard's checkout flow research shows 10% of US online shoppers have abandoned because the site didn't offer their desired payment option, according to (Baymard Institute — Checkout Flow UX Optimization).
Website performance is non-negotiable: 57% of online consumers abandon carts if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, and website errors or crashes cause 17% of customers to abandon transactions. Speed is not a UX luxury — it is a direct revenue variable.
Account creation friction costs more than most stores realize. 18% of shoppers abandon because they do not want to create an account. That number is entirely avoidable with a properly surfaced guest checkout path.
One underrated exit trigger: 40% of shoppers switch to a competitor after abandoning a cart. Your abandoned cart is not a paused sale — it is often a completed sale for someone else.
How much revenue are you losing to abandoned carts each year?
Globally, $18 billion in sales is lost annually due to cart abandonment. That aggregate figure is the ceiling; your store's share of it scales with your traffic volume and average order value.
The per-visitor cost is the more actionable number for individual operators. When someone abandons their cart, approximately $4.75 in acquisition costs are lost per person. That $4.75 represents all spend from awareness through to the final recovery nudge — paid ads, email flows, retargeting — allocated to a visitor who never converted. Your true cost-per-order is not just the cost of acquiring buyers; it includes the cost of every cart that evaporated.
Run the arithmetic for your own store: multiply your monthly cart-start volume by your abandonment rate, then multiply by $4.75. That is the minimum acquisition budget you are burning on non-converting visitors every month, before you account for the gross margin you never collected on those orders.
Is your checkout process a conversion killer?
Your checkout process is almost certainly longer than it needs to be. The average checkout flow consists of 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields. A separate Baymard audit found the average US checkout displays 23.48 form elements by default. Most of those fields can be collapsed, auto-filled, or removed entirely.
Re-entry friction is a specific, measurable problem. 30% of shoppers abandon if they need to re-enter credit card information. A separate study puts that figure at 55% when both card and shipping details need re-entry. Either way, forcing a returning customer to type their card number again is a direct revenue leak with a known fix: saved payment methods and address auto-complete.
62% of ecommerce sites do not make guest checkout the most prominent option. Combined with the 18% of shoppers who abandon over account creation, that is a straightforward mismatch between what sites present and what shoppers want. Guest checkout should be the default path, with account creation offered as an optional post-purchase step.
UX quality across the industry remains poor. 64% of desktop sites and 63% of mobile sites have "mediocre" or worse checkout UX performance. That is not a marginal problem — it describes the majority of competing stores, which means fixing your checkout puts you ahead of most of the market.
How can improving checkout design boost your conversion rates?
Checkout design improvements alone can increase conversion rates by 35.26% for the average large ecommerce site, according to (Baymard Institute — Checkout Usability Report). That is not a projection based on best-case assumptions — it is derived from usability testing across real checkout flows.
To put that in context: if your store currently converts at the global average of 2.74%, a 35.26% relative improvement would bring that to approximately 3.71%. On a store generating 10,000 monthly sessions, the difference between those two rates is roughly 97 additional completed orders per month — before any increase in traffic spend.
The highest-leverage fixes are not redesigns. They are targeted removals and reorderings: eliminate redundant form fields, move cost transparency to the product page (not just the cart), surface guest checkout above account login, and auto-detect the shopper's country to pre-fill address fields. Each of those changes addresses a documented abandonment trigger with a known prevalence.
Can AI and retargeting save abandoned carts?
Predictive AI tools can reduce cart abandonment rate by 18%. The mechanism is behavioral — AI identifies the signals that precede abandonment (hesitation on the payment page, cursor moving toward the browser close button, extended idle time) and triggers an intervention before the shopper leaves.
38% of consumers appreciate reminders about products they have browsed. That receptiveness is the behavioral foundation for abandonment email flows. The average click-through rate for cart abandonment emails is 23.33% — substantially higher than standard promotional email benchmarks, because the recipient has already expressed purchase intent.
Across the stores we manage at MirandaMedia, the pattern we keep seeing is that the first abandonment email — sent within one hour of the cart being left — consistently outperforms later follow-ups by a wide margin, regardless of whether it includes a discount. Urgency and relevance matter more than the incentive.
Retargeting ad spend on abandoners is more efficient than prospecting, but it still costs money. Every dollar spent re-acquiring a shopper who already visited reduces the margin on that eventual order. The better approach is to fix the checkout friction that caused the abandonment in the first place, so retargeting becomes a smaller share of your recovery budget rather than the primary one.
Industry-specific abandonment rates: Where are the biggest leaks?
Cart abandonment rates vary by over 40 percentage points across industries, so your benchmark matters as much as the global average.
| Industry | Cart Abandonment Rate | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery | 50.03% | VWO |
| Pet Care & Veterinary | 56.1% | eMarketer (12 months to Jul 2024) |
| Retail | 71.24% | VWO |
| Travel | 82% | VWO |
| Luxury & Jewelry | 81.4% | eMarketer (12 months to Jul 2024) |
| Fashion | 87.79% | VWO |
| Automotive | 85.97% | VWO |
| Cruise & Ferry | ~98% | Contentsquare |
Luxury and jewelry had the highest cart abandonment rate at 81.4% in the 12 months ending July 2024. Pet care and veterinary services had the lowest average abandonment rate of 56.1% over the same period.
The cruise and ferry industry experiences the highest cart abandonment rates, nearing 98%. That near-total abandonment reflects the research-heavy nature of high-ticket, high-commitment purchases — shoppers return multiple times before buying, so a single session abandonment rate overstates actual lost revenue.
Fashion's 87.79% rate reflects a different problem: size uncertainty, fit anxiety, and the ease of switching between tabs to compare. Transparent sizing guides, clear return policies shown before checkout, and size-recommendation tools address the root cause rather than trying to recover the shopper after they leave.
If your store sits in a high-abandonment category, the global 70.22% average is the wrong benchmark. Measuring against your category peers gives you a more accurate picture of whether your checkout is performing or underperforming relative to what is structurally achievable.
Editor's Take — Michal Baloun, Co-founder
The 70.22% average abandonment rate is the number everyone quotes, but it is not the number that should keep you up at night. The number that should is $4.75 — the acquisition cost burned every time a visitor walks away from a full cart. You already paid to get that person to the checkout page. The abandonment is not a missed future sale; it is a confirmed sunk cost.
What I see most often when we audit stores is that the checkout friction is obvious in hindsight but invisible to the operator who built it. They added a loyalty points field because marketing wanted it. They kept the account creation gate because the CRM integration required it. They never removed the "how did you hear about us?" dropdown because someone thought it was useful data. Each of those decisions costs a measurable percentage of completions, and none of them look like a big deal individually.
The 35.26% conversion lift from checkout design improvements is the most underused number in ecommerce. You can spend months testing ad creative and landing page copy for incremental gains, then leave a third of your potential checkout conversions on the table because the form has too many fields or the guest checkout button is buried below the account login.
My practical advice: record five checkout sessions on mobile using a session replay tool. Watch where people pause, where they scroll back up, where they exit. You will find the friction in under an hour. Then fix the top three issues before you invest another euro in retargeting. Recovery emails are valuable, but they are more expensive than prevention — and they only work on the 38% of shoppers who are receptive to reminders. The other 62% are already gone.
Here's what advice from Margly looks like
Most analytics dashboards stop at "your number is X". Margly stops at the next sentence — what to do, where, how much it's worth. Recommendations Margly would surface for the patterns described in this article:
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High priority "Surface total order cost — including shipping — on the product page, not just at checkout." 48% of abandoners cite unexpected extra costs as their primary exit reason; showing the full landed cost earlier removes the biggest single abandonment trigger before it fires. Estimated impact: +$1,800 to +$3,200 / month
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High priority "Make guest checkout the default, most prominent option above account login." 62% of sites bury guest checkout, and 18% of shoppers abandon specifically to avoid account creation — fixing the button order and label costs zero development time. Estimated impact: +$1,200 to +$2,400 / month
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Medium priority "Audit and remove redundant form fields from your checkout flow." The average checkout displays 23.48 form elements; eliminating fields that can be auto-filled or deferred to post-purchase reduces the friction driving the 17% who cite a complicated process. Estimated impact: +$600 to +$1,400 / month
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Medium priority "Set up a one-hour post-abandonment email triggered by cart exit, no discount required." Cart abandonment emails average a 23.33% click-through rate; a timely, product-specific reminder outperforms later discount-led sequences and costs nothing beyond the automation setup. Estimated impact: +$800 to +$1,600 / month
Notice none of those needed a CSV export. That's the difference between raw analytics and concrete advice.
What is the average cart abandonment rate in ecommerce?
The average cart abandonment rate across ecommerce sites is 70.22%, according to Baymard Institute's aggregate of published studies. Recent annual data shows the figure fluctuating between 70.19% and 73.94% depending on the measurement period and methodology. Mobile devices push the blended rate higher, with abandonment on phones running at 80.2% versus 71.8% on desktop.
What are the main reasons for cart abandonment?
Unexpected extra costs — shipping fees, taxes, mandatory add-ons revealed only at checkout — are cited by 48% of shoppers as their primary reason for abandoning, making them the single largest recoverable driver. 42% of US online shoppers abandon because they were browsing without purchase intent, which is harder to address at checkout. 17% leave due to a long or complicated checkout process, and 21% cite delivery being too slow.
How much revenue is lost due to cart abandonment?
Globally, $18 billion in sales is lost annually due to cart abandonment. At the individual store level, the more actionable figure is $4.75 in acquisition cost lost per abandoned cart — representing all spend from awareness through to the final recovery touchpoint allocated to a visitor who never completed a purchase.
How can I improve my cart abandonment rate?
Start with the four highest-prevalence friction points: show total costs including shipping before the cart stage, make guest checkout the most prominent option, reduce form fields to the minimum required, and ensure your checkout pages load in under three seconds. 57% of shoppers abandon if a page takes longer than three seconds to load. After fixing on-site friction, build a one-hour post-abandonment email sequence — cart abandonment emails average a 23.33% click-through rate, making them one of the highest-performing automated flows available.
What is the cart abandonment rate for mobile devices?
Mobile devices have a cart abandonment rate of 80.2%, compared to 71.8% on desktop. The gap reflects the combined effect of smaller screens making form entry harder, more frequent interruptions during mobile browsing sessions, and checkout flows that were designed for desktop and never properly adapted for touch navigation. A mobile-specific checkout audit — particularly around form field sizing, payment method presentation, and page load speed — typically surfaces the highest-return fixes.
Sources:
- Baymard Institute — Cart Abandonment Rate
- Contentsquare — Cart Abandonment Stats
- eMarketer — Cart Abandonment Benchmark
- Baymard Institute — Checkout Usability Report
- Baymard Institute — Current State of Checkout UX
- Baymard Institute — Checkout Flow UX Optimization
- VWO — Cart Abandonment Statistics
- Drip — Cart Abandonment Statistics
- Pharynx.ai — Abandoned Cart Recovery and CAC
- GetGlued Insights — Cart Abandonment Statistics