Someone found your bakery online, picked out a dozen boxes of pastries for Friday morning, typed in their address, saw a $24 delivery fee, and closed the tab. Nothing broke. Your site worked exactly as designed. You just lost the order anyway.
That’s cart abandonment, and it is the normal state of online retail rather than a sign that something has gone wrong. Roughly seven out of ten carts never turn into orders. What matters is which part of yours you can do something about, and if you run your own deliveries, that’s probably more than you think.
This guide covers the whole subject: what the term means, how to work out your own rate, what a good rate looks like for a business like yours, and the full ranked list of why people walk. Two of those reasons are big enough to have their own guide, so where this page summarizes, it points you to the delivery-side fixes that bring the rate down and to the recovery emails that win back customers who already left.
The Bottom Line
- The documented average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, drawn from 50 separate studies (Baymard Institute, retrieved 2026-10-03). Seven in ten is the baseline, not a crisis.
- About 42% of US shoppers abandon because they were just browsing and never intended to buy that day (Baymard Institute, retrieved 2026-10-03). No checkout change touches that group.
- Of the reasons you can fix, the top two are both delivery: extra costs like shipping, tax and fees at 40%, and delivery being too slow at 20%.
- Food and beverage sits around 63.6% while luxury and jewellery runs near 82.8% (Contentsquare, retrieved 2026-10-03). Compare yourself to your category, not to the global average.
- Mobile abandons at about 80% against 66% on desktop. If most of your traffic is phones, your blended number will look worse than your checkout deserves.
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What cart abandonment means
Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds something to an online cart and then leaves without buying. The cart is created, the intent is recorded, and the order never arrives.
It matters because a created cart is the strongest signal a visitor gives you short of paying. Someone who browsed three product pages and left told you very little. Someone who put six dozen croissants in a cart and entered a delivery address told you they wanted those croissants on that day. When that person leaves, you haven’t lost a browser. You’ve lost a buyer who ran into something.
Cart abandonment vs. checkout abandonment
These two get used interchangeably and they shouldn’t be, because they point at different problems.
Cart abandonment counts everyone who added an item and didn’t buy. It includes the window shoppers, the price comparers, and the people using your cart as a wish list.
Checkout abandonment counts only people who started the checkout flow (entered an email, picked a delivery option, began a payment) and still didn’t finish. It’s a much smaller group and a much more damning one. These people decided to buy and then changed their minds inside your own process.
Checkout abandonment averages lower than cart abandonment because the browsers have already dropped out. If you only have the budget and attention to track one number, track this one. It’s the number that reflects decisions you control.
How do you calculate cart abandonment rate?
The formula is short:
Cart abandonment rate = (1 − completed orders ÷ carts created) × 100
Say your shop created 500 carts last month and 150 of them became orders. Divide 150 by 500 and you get 0.30. Subtract that from 1 for 0.70. Multiply by 100 and your cart abandonment rate is 70%.
Most platforms will produce this for you. Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce all report abandoned checkouts natively, and Google Analytics 4 can build it from the add_to_cart and purchase events.
Two things make the raw number more useful:
- Segment it by device. A blended rate hides the gap between phone and desktop, and that gap is usually where the problem lives.
- Segment it by delivery zone. This is the one most shops skip and the one that pays off fastest when you deliver your own orders. If customers four towns over abandon at 85% while your neighbourhood sits at 60%, your delivery pricing at the edge of your zone is doing that, not your checkout design.
Track the rate monthly and watch the direction. A single month’s figure tells you almost nothing on its own.
What is a good cart abandonment rate?
There isn’t a universal good number, because the category you sell in moves the baseline more than anything you do on your site.
| Category | Typical abandonment rate |
|---|---|
| Consumer goods | 57.4% |
| Food and beverage | 63.6% |
| Multi-brand retail | 76.9% |
| Fashion and apparel | 78.5% |
| Home and furniture | 80.3% |
| Beauty and personal care | 80.9% |
| Luxury and jewellery | 82.8% |
| All categories | 70.2% |
Source: Contentsquare, retrieved 2026-10-03; global average from Baymard Institute.
Read that table carefully if you sell food. A 75% rate would be unremarkable for a furniture store and a serious problem for a bakery, because food and beverage shoppers buy with far more intent and far less comparison. They know what a croissant costs. They’re not shopping around for forty minutes.
Device changes the picture too. Mobile abandonment runs around 80% against roughly 66% on desktop. A shop whose customers order from their phones at 7am will post a worse blended number than an identical shop selling to office buyers on laptops, and neither one is doing anything differently.
So the honest answer: a good rate is one that’s lower than it was last quarter, measured against your own category and your own device mix.
Why customers abandon carts, ranked
Baymard Institute asked US shoppers why they abandoned their most recent cart. Setting aside the people who were only browsing, here’s what they said:
| Reason | Share of shoppers |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) | 40% |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% |
| Didn’t trust the site with card details | 19% |
| Site required an account | 18% |
| Checkout was too long or complicated | 17% |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% |
| Unsatisfactory returns policy | 13% |
| Couldn’t see total cost upfront | 12% |
| Card was declined | 10% |
| Not enough payment methods | 9% |
Source: Baymard Institute, retrieved 2026-10-03.
Shoppers could pick more than one reason, which is why the column doesn’t total 100%.
Three things stand out. The list is dominated by cost and delivery, not by design. Trust and account friction cluster in the middle and are cheap to fix. And nothing at the bottom is worth your attention until the top is handled.
The 42% who were never going to buy
Before you act on any of that, carve out the largest group of all: around 42% of US shoppers abandon simply because they were browsing and weren’t ready to buy.
That’s people using a cart the way their parents used a shop window. You cannot redesign your checkout into capturing them, and chasing that number will make you miserable.
What it means practically is that your realistic floor is well above zero. If your rate is 70% and roughly 42% of abandoners were never buyers, the addressable portion of your problem is a much smaller slice than the headline suggests. Work that slice.
The two biggest fixable causes are both about delivery
Add the top two rows of that table together and the picture gets very clear for anyone who delivers their own orders. Extra costs at 40% and slow delivery at 20% are the two largest addressable reasons people abandon, and both of them are decided by how you price, present and schedule delivery.
This is the part that generic cart abandonment advice gets wrong. Most of it was written for a brand shipping a hoodie across the country, so it talks about progress bars, trust badges and guest checkout. Those help. They are not where your money is going.
If you run deliveries yourself, your levers look different:
- When the fee appears. A $12 delivery charge that shows on the product page costs you far fewer orders than the same $12 revealed on the final screen. The surprise does the damage, not the amount.
- Whether the date is a date. “Arrives Friday 14 March” outperforms “3–5 business days” because one is a promise and the other is a range the shopper has to decode.
- Where your zone ends. Customers just outside your comfortable radius get quoted a fee that reflects your cost, not their expectation, and they leave.
- What the free-delivery threshold is. Shoppers have been trained hard on this. Amazon Prime gives free same-day over $25 and Walmart+ sets its bar at $35, and those numbers now shape what a customer thinks is reasonable at your shop too.
- Whether they can simply come and collect. A pickup option costs you nothing and rescues the shopper who won’t pay a delivery fee at any price. If you run a counter as well as a website, combining your online and in-store sides properly keeps that lever permanently available.
Each of those is a specific change with a specific result, which is why they have their own guide rather than a paragraph here. The full playbook is in how to decrease cart abandonment when delivery is the problem.
Reducing abandonment before it happens
Outside the delivery levers, the fixes that consistently move the number are unglamorous:
- Offer guest checkout. Requiring an account costs 18% of abandoners. Ask for the account after the order is placed, not before.
- Show the total early. Twelve percent abandon because they can’t see what they’ll pay. A cart subtotal that includes delivery and tax removes the entire category of nasty surprise.
- Cut the fields. Every input you don’t strictly need is a reason to stop. You don’t need a phone number and a date of birth to sell someone a cake.
- Fix the phone experience first. With mobile abandoning roughly 14 points worse than desktop, the phone checkout is usually where the cheapest wins are sitting.
- Take the payment methods people use. Nine percent leave over this, and adding a wallet option is a settings change rather than a project.
None of this is exotic. It’s a morning’s work on most storefronts, and it clears the middle of the table so you can concentrate on the top of it.
Winning back the carts you already lost
Some share of abandonment is recoverable after the fact, and the main tool is a short sequence of emails sent to people who left an address behind.
The performance is real. Brands using Klaviyo see average open rates above 50% on cart abandonment flows, and sending three messages instead of one produces dramatically more recovered revenue than a single reminder. The first email goes out within an hour or two while intent is still warm, the second the following day, the third a few days later with a reason to come back.
There’s craft in what those emails say, when they land, and whether they should carry a discount at all. That gets its own treatment in our guide to the best abandoned cart emails to win back customers.
One caution worth stating here: recovery emails treat the symptom. If 40% of your abandoners left over a delivery fee, an email reminding them about the delivery fee will not perform well. Fix the cause, then recover what’s left.
Which numbers to watch each month
You don’t need a dashboard. You need four figures and ten minutes:
- Checkout abandonment rate, not just cart abandonment. This is the one tied to decisions you control.
- Abandonment split by device. Phone versus desktop, tracked separately, every month.
- Abandonment split by delivery zone. The single most revealing cut for a business that delivers, and almost nobody runs it.
- Recovered revenue from your email flow. Shows whether the back end is earning its keep.
Watch the direction over a quarter rather than reacting to any one month. Seasonality moves these numbers a lot, especially for food, flowers and anything tied to a holiday.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good cart abandonment rate?
It depends entirely on your category. Food and beverage averages around 63.6%, while luxury and jewellery runs near 82.8%, against a global average of 70.22%. Compare yourself to similar shops and to your own previous quarters rather than to a universal target.
Is cart abandonment the same as checkout abandonment?
No. Cart abandonment counts everyone who added an item and didn’t buy, including browsers. Checkout abandonment counts only shoppers who started the checkout process and still didn’t finish. Checkout abandonment is the smaller, more actionable number.
How much of cart abandonment can I fix?
Less than the headline rate implies. Around 42% of shoppers abandon because they were only browsing, which no checkout change will address. Your realistic target is the remainder, where cost and delivery issues dominate.
Why do shipping and delivery costs cause so much abandonment?
Because they usually appear late. Extra costs including shipping, tax and fees are cited by 40% of abandoners, and research consistently points at the surprise rather than the amount. The same fee shown on the product page costs far fewer orders than one revealed at the final step.
Do abandoned cart emails actually work?
Yes, within limits. Open rates on cart abandonment flows average above 50% on Klaviyo, and multi-email sequences substantially outperform single reminders. They recover a share of lost orders but can’t fix the underlying reason people left.
Where to go from here
Cart abandonment is a measurement, and most of it is made up of people who were never going to buy today. The portion that matters is smaller, more specific, and for a business that runs its own deliveries, concentrated almost entirely in what you charge for delivery and when you say it will arrive.
Start by calculating your rate and splitting it by device and delivery zone. That one exercise usually tells you whether you have a checkout problem or a delivery-pricing problem, and those need completely different responses. Then work the top of the list down, and set up a recovery sequence to catch what’s left.
