The truth is... as an e-Commerce store you lose sales from cart abandonment. This post breaks down not only how to properly measure shopping cart abandonment, but also key cart abandonment statistics including industry benchmarks.

If you'd like to learn about how to lower cart abandonment, see our comprehensive guide on cart abandonment and case studies here. Otherwise, read on to see eCommerce stats on cart abandonment.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect the current cart abandonment statistics in 2021.

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:

In fact, even the calendar can change cart abandonment rate.

In 2019, Black Friday saw global cart abandonment rates of 73.78%. Just a few days later on Cyber Monday, cart abandonment rate dropped to 68.94%. 

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

In 2019, the average cart abandonment rate was 77.13%.

In addition to looking at the global average, we segmented the database by the most represented countries in our database and found significant differences. 

Spain had the highest cart abandonment rate at 86.15%. Meanwhile the Netherlands had the lowest cart abandonment rate at 65.49%. The United States was the second lowest with an average cart abandonment rate of 71.86%.

We also segmented the cart abandonment rate data by device. 

Again, while the global average is 77.73%, breaking out the segments tells a much richer story. On phone devices cart abandonment rate shot up to 80.79%. Meanwhile sessions on desktops only had a cart abandonment rate of 73.93%, a 6.86% improvement!

Cart abandonment email open rates are incredibly high. Since 2016, open rates have hovered around 43%.

Despite increasing competition, our clients have seen increasing open rates on average for the past four years.

Ultimately, shopping cart emails are on average more relevant than non cart abandonment, and show how incorporating personalization into your email strategies can improve results.

Looking at the average click through rate for cart abandonment emails, we again see consistent, excellent results.  In 2021, the average click through rate for cart abandonment emails was 8.76%, and has been right around the average since 2016.

We define a conversion here as a recovered transaction, and calculate the conversion rate by taking the number of recovered transactions divided by the number of opened cart abandonment emails. 

This again points to the efficacy of using in-session data for marketing. Being able to recognize when a customer is interested in a product, and reaching back to draw them in produces results. And there is no better way to do this than with cart abandonment emails. 

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.

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

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.

Given cart abandonment's impact on eCommerce, cart functions are increasingly becoming a point of competitive advantage. Below we highlight the work of Dan Jian et el from the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research.

The study focused on checkout carts from the largest Chinese websites. 

The comparison shows a variety of checkout capabilities stores are using to help shoppers complete purchases within the cart. These include the ability to display additional product information, reducing prices in cart, options for promotions, setting a product cap, handling and deleting products, and sorting/classifying products in cart.

Importantly, the study showed that choice overload was a primary contributor to 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. 

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.

We covered how to reduce browse abandonment in our post titled "Guide: Multi-Channel Browse Abandonment to Drive Conversions". The guide includes a breakdown of effective eCommerce interruptions as well as screenshots from top performing companies.

Above, Care.com re-engages customers to finish signing up for their premium product. To see more examples of browse abandonment campaigns, click here. 

Finally, we have "email my cart" abandonment, which refers to when a customer has placed an item in their cart, but did not reach the checkout page. 

For this, we have a whole different series of triggers and email followup campaigns. And, it turns out, these types of engagements perform even better than standard shopping cart abandonment campaigns.

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!