Cart Abandonment Rate
Cart abandonment rate is the share of carts created in a period that never became an order.
The standard formula is (carts created − orders placed) ÷ carts created, measured over a chosen window and usually restricted to a single sales channel — an online store, for example — so that other channels like point-of-sale or wholesale orders don't distort the online figure.
The rate depends heavily on what counts as a "cart" in the underlying platform. Some systems count a cart the moment one item is added; others wait until the shopper reaches checkout. Comparing abandonment rates across two stores, or across two platforms, only makes sense if both use the same definition of a cart.
Because the rate is a ratio, it can move for two very different reasons: more carts are actually being abandoned, or the number of carts created has changed. A traffic spike from a promotion can pull the rate down even if shopper behavior hasn't changed at all — reading the rate alongside the underlying counts avoids mistaking a traffic-mix shift for a behavioral one.
Unfiltered bot traffic inflates the carts-created count without ever producing an order, which pushes this rate up without any change in real shopper behavior.
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