Glossary
Cart abandonment rate
The share of shopping carts that are created but never converted into a completed purchase.
Cart abandonment rate is the proportion of shopping carts that a visitor starts but does not complete as a purchase. It is one of the most commonly cited e-commerce metrics, because it isolates the specific point — after a product has already been selected — where a sale was lost.
It is calculated as 1 − (completed purchases ÷ carts created), usually expressed as a percentage over a given period. It is closely related to checkout funnel analysis, which breaks the same drop-off down into individual steps (shipping details, payment entry, confirmation) to show exactly where abandonment concentrates, rather than reporting a single aggregate figure. Reported abandonment rates vary widely by industry, device, and how a "cart" is defined (some platforms count a cart as soon as an item is added, others only once checkout begins), which makes the metric hard to compare across sources without knowing the definition used.
Cart abandonment rate matters because it's a large, addressable source of lost revenue, and common causes — unexpected shipping costs, a forced account creation step, a slow or confusing checkout, limited payment options — are usually fixable once identified. The main pitfall is treating the headline rate as diagnostic on its own: without the underlying funnel breakdown or average order value segmentation, a change in the number doesn't say what to fix.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026