Complete List of Cart Abandonment Statistics: 2006-2018

It's 2018 and cart abandonment continues to plague retailers. This post collects a number of cart abandonment statistics, both from our own database consisting of billions of sessions and third party studies.

The truth is…

You lose sales from cart abandonment.

The questions are
(a) Why customers leave your site without purchasing, and
(b) What you can do about it.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect the current cart abandonment statistics in 2018.

There have been hundreds of studies surrounding cart abandonment statistics.

Some studies place abandonment as high as 80%, while other studies place cart abandonment as low as 55%.

In our study, we found the average cart abandonment rate for 2016 was
77.24%. This number rose slightly in 2017 to 78.65%. 

In other words, over 3/4 of shoppers choose to leave the site without completing a purchase.

However - as we show below - there is much more to the story of cart abandonment than the average. We segment these aggregate stat across three primary dimensions:

The good news is that you have a massive opportunity to dramatically increase revenue by transforming these abandoned carts into recovered ones.

We compared abandonment rates between 2015 and 2016. Unfortunately, what we found was not encouraging.

In 2015, the global average abandonment rate was 71.39%. In one year, stores on average experienced an 8.4% increase in shoppers leaving without completing their purchase.

This trend held true across all devices.

Third party analysis from Statisa shows a similar trend. 

In 2006, 59.8% of shoppers abandoned their cart. By 2017 that number has risen to 69.23%, a 15.79% increase.

Today mobile traffic accounts for over half (50.48%) of all traffic in eCommerce. 

Unfortunately, according to our own research done in 2015, there is a clear correlation between small screens and increased cart abandonment.

Mobile has the highest cart abandonment rates, with 85.65% of all transactions ending without a sale. Meanwhile, tablets converted sales 80.74% of the time, a 5.7% improvement in revenue.

Desktops performed the best in terms of cart abandonment, with 73.07% of transactions failed.

The trend is obvious. The smaller the size of the screen, the more likely a customer is to not purchase. This is problematic considering that for the first time ever, more digital buyers will use smartphones than desktops to shop.

The trend has continued through 2017, where mobile cart abandonment continues to outpace desktop by 16%.

Why is this?

According to RetailDive, eCommerce shops are still not optimized for mobile. Slow load times abound. Many stores remain unresponsive, forcing customers to zoom in and out to navigate a page.

Worse, pop-ups that are fine on desktop take up are often not fine on mobile.

Further, every inconvenience driving cart abandonment on desktop - such as mandatory registrations and long checkout processes, are intensified on smartphones.

Data in aggregate can be misleading. The truth is, abandonment rates vary drastically from industry to industry.

In order to understand how your store is performing, you should compare your current checkout rates to other stores within your industry.

A study conducted by Statista shows that the abandonment rate went up by over 24% from the Gaming Industry to the Finance Industry.

This graphic from SalesCycle illustrates the point nicely.

As you can see, a "good" cart abandonment rate changes dramatically depending on what industry your store is in.

Finance and Non-Profits experience some of the highest cart abandonment rates, averaging over 10% more than the global average shopping cart abandonment rate. 

Meanwhile, Gaming and Fashion industries experience some of the lowest rates. 

There are a number of important stats to keep track of an optimize in a full fledge cart abandonment campaign.

Below is a quick definition of the most important cart abandonment statistics. I've also included some global stats from the folks at MooSend.

These stats fall in line with our own study of email marketing statistics, which found that the average conversion rate for shopping cart abandonment emails was 18.64%.

If you are a Barilliance customer, all of these statistics will be tracked automatically in your dashboard.

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You can find examples of cart abandonment emails (along with best practices and templates) here. 

We've put together an in-depth article on the top 10 reasons for cart abandonment and their solutions here. 

Two key takeaways to touch on here.

First, a full 22% of respondents said that they abandoned their carts because they were asked to create a new user account. 

When you combine that with other time-consuming and frustrating tasks from the user's point of view (literally labeled "Long and Confusing Checkout" in the survey), you can reduce your abandonment rate by 31% by simply streamlining your checkout process!

Second, some customers simply abandon carts because they are comparison shopping.

While you won't be able to prevent these visitors from shopping other stores, it does stress the importance of implementing cart recovery campaigns to get back in touch with prospects and distinguish yourself from your competitors.

While this article has focused on shopping cart abandonment, there are many other abandonment points that you should consider.

Form abandonment occurs when customers begin filling out fields in a form, but for some reason decide to leave before completing.

These forms could be for free products such as newsletters, more information such as a free demo request or price requests, or online applications.

In general, the longer the form, the more friction customers experience, and the greater possibility that they will not fill out the form.

Browse abandonment is a higher level form of abandonment. Sometimes, shoppers clearly engage with a product category, viewing multiple products, zooming in on pictures, and comparing prices without placing a product into a cart.

Browse abandonment refers to customers who show this level of engagement, but leave the site without either placing an item in a cart or completing a purchase.

Understanding the facts is the first step in creating an effective marketing campaign to recover abandoned carts.

The next step is understanding why your customers are not deciding to purchase.

We've ​created a number of free resources for you as you begin to combat cart abandonment.

Lastly, if you are looking for a complete solution to cart abandonment, schedule a quick talk with one of our cart abandonment experts. We will be able to share how Barilliance has helped hundreds of retailers maximize their traffic.

Good luck!