Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment can happen at any point after a shopper starts a cart and before an order is placed — it doesn't require the shopper to have reached the checkout page, only to have shown intent to buy by putting something in the cart.

It's typically measured over a period (a day, a week, a month) as a rate: abandoned carts divided by carts created. A store's cart abandonment rate and its checkout abandonment rate answer related but different questions — the checkout abandonment rate narrows the denominator to shoppers who had already started checkout.

Not every abandoned cart represents a lost sale a business could have won. Window shopping, price comparison, and saving a cart for later all produce abandonment. What a business can act on is the abandonment that was preventable — a shopper who was ready to buy and left for a reason a well-timed offer or reassurance could have addressed.