Cart abandonment rate: how to calculate it, what’s normal, and how to fix your checkout

The short answer

Cart abandonment rate is the share of shopping carts that never turn into an order. On average, 70.22% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That’s Baymard Institute’s figure, calculated from 50 different studies. In plain terms: of every ten carts, about three become orders.

Useful as a sense of scale. Less useful as a target, for three reasons this article goes through: there’s more than one formula, the studies behind the average vary enormously, and a large share of abandoners were never going to buy.

Three formulas, three different numbers

“Cart abandonment” is used for three different things. They give very different results on the same store:

How to measure it in Shopify and Google Analytics

In Shopify

Shopify’s Conversion rate breakdown report shows sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout and sessions that completed checkout. Two details matter:

• Every step is shown as a share of all sessions, not of the step before. Do the division yourself, using the formulas above.
• A session only counts as having reached checkout if the visitor did something there: Shopify requires “user input (for example, a key press or mouse click) during checkout”.

Shopify also reports a checkout conversion rate, defined as sessions that completed checkout divided by sessions that reached checkout. Your checkout abandonment rate is simply 100% minus that.

The Abandoned checkouts list under Orders is a different thing. It only contains checkouts where the shopper entered an email and stayed inactive for more than ten minutes, and they’re removed after three months. It’s the right place for recovery emails, but you can’t calculate a rate from it.

In Google Analytics 4

The Checkout journey report is a closed funnel: begin checkout, add shipping info, add payment info, purchase. A shopper who skips a step drops out of the funnel. On Shopify, the begin checkout, add payment info and purchase events are sent for you, but add shipping info is not, so that step stays empty until you set it up. Don’t read an empty shipping step as everyone leaving there.

Is your rate good? Why 70% is a weak benchmark

The 70.22% average is real, but the 50 studies behind it range from 55.00% to 84.27%. They come from different years, industries and ways of measuring. A store selling €15 refills and one selling €2,000 sofas shouldn’t expect the same rate.

More importantly, many abandoned carts were never real purchases. In Baymard’s latest survey, 42% of US online shoppers who abandoned did so because they were “just browsing” or not ready to buy. People use the cart as a wishlist, a price check or a way to see shipping costs. No checkout redesign will win those back.

So compare your rate with your own: last quarter, the same season last year, phones against desktop. If phones abandon far more often than computers on your store, that difference is yours to fix, whatever the industry average says.

Why shoppers leave, and what to do about each reason

Leaving aside those who were just browsing, Baymard asked shoppers why they abandoned a checkout. Each reason points to a different fix, and to a different step to watch:

Baymard doesn’t publish the sample size behind this list on the page, so treat the exact percentages as a ranking rather than a precise measurement.

Fix the checkout itself

Baymard’s 2025 review of checkout usability rated 64% of desktop and 63% of mobile checkouts “mediocre” or worse; only 2% were good. The most common mistakes it found:

• 62% of sites don’t make guest checkout the most prominent option.
• 94% show generic error messages that don’t tell the shopper what’s wrong.
• 61% don’t mark both required and optional fields.
• 49% ask for a phone number without saying why.
• 48% show a delivery speed (“3–5 days”) instead of a date.

The average checkout also had 11.3 form fields in 2024, while most sites need only 8. By Baymard’s estimate, the average large ecommerce site could gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone. That’s a ceiling for large sites, not a forecast for yours, but it shows how much room the checkout usually leaves.

Before changing anything, go through your own checkout on your phone, as a guest, with a real card. Then look at what happens just before it: session recordings of visits that reached the cart show where shoppers hesitate and what they go looking for before they give up. (They stop at the checkout itself and never capture what people type.)

Recovery emails help, but they come second

Abandoned-cart emails are worth having: Shopify can send them automatically to people who entered an email and didn’t finish. But they only reach shoppers who got that far, and they recover a sale after it was lost. Fixing the reason people leave keeps the sale in the first place. Do both, in that order.

How to know a fix worked

Two common mistakes make checkout fixes look better or worse than they are.

Watching the wrong number. Abandonment is a ratio, and a ratio can improve for the wrong reason. If a change means fewer casual browsers add to cart, the abandonment rate falls, but you don’t sell a single extra item. Judge a fix by orders per session (your conversion rate) or revenue per visitor, and use the step-level rate to see where it acted.

Reading it too early. Weekdays and weekends behave differently, and a small store has few checkouts a week. Run a change for at least two full weeks, and if you can, test it against the old version with an A/B test rather than comparing before and after. On Shopify, the product page and the cart can be A/B tested with most testing tools, but the checkout is closed to most of them. Shopify’s own Experiments (Grow plan and up) can test checkout settings; otherwise a careful before-and-after is what you have. How long that test needs depends on your traffic.

If your carts are fine but too few people add to cart in the first place, the problem sits earlier; this guide covers the whole funnel.