Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment occurs when a customer adds products to the cart but does not complete the purchase. According to the Baymard Institute, the abandonment rate averages around 70 percent across industries.

Cart abandonment is normal, but expensive: according to the Baymard Institute, roughly seven out of ten filled carts are never purchased. The most common reasons are unexpected costs (shipping, duties), forced account creation, complicated checkouts, missing payment methods, security concerns and plain comparison shopping or procrastination.

The first line of defense is prevention: communicate shipping costs early and transparently, offer guest checkout, provide the payment methods your market expects and keep the checkout free of obstacles on mobile. Express options like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal Express shorten the path to purchase considerably.

The second line is recovery: abandoned-cart emails (native in Shopify or via tools like Klaviyo), ideally as a sequence with a reminder and value-focused arguments, win back a meaningful share of purchases. Retargeting via Meta and Google adds to that, though consent requirements limit its reach. Use discount codes in recovery emails sparingly. Otherwise you train customers to abandon.

Tracking setups

Related terms

Checkout
The checkout is the final purchase flow of an online store: every step from cart handover through address entry and payment selection to the order confirmation.
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Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the share of store visitors who complete a desired action. In e-commerce that is usually a purchase.
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Tracking
Tracking is the measurement of user behavior in your store: which channels bring visitors, what they do on the site and which marketing activities lead to purchases.
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