Cart Abandonment Rate

The term cart abandonment is used when a customer, who intends purchasing an item from an ecommerce store, does not complete the checkout procedure and therefore does not actually make a purchase. Analytics software allows website owners to track the cart abandonment rate, providing ecommerce merchants with valuable information as to how their site is performing. The cart abandonment rate is calculated as a percentage of the ratio between the number of add-to-cart clicks compared to the number of completed sales.

Why Cart Abandonments Occur

Cart abandonment rates for ecommerce stores are usually quite high, up to 80% with the average rate being about 65%. The reasons for high cart abandonment rates can be attributed to numerous factors. These can include complicated checkout procedures, timed-out failures during the checkout process or additional costs for delivery or other add-on charges that may seem excessive to the purchaser.

Observing cart abandonment rate is important to help ecommerce store owners identify where changes need to be made. If a business has a high cart abandonment rate, the cause of this sales loss needs to be established. These causes can include any of those listed above, a combination of these or some other cause. It is important to rectify this in order to improve sales. A healthy cart abandonment rate will be less than 65% but ideally one would try to improve whereever possible.