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Cart abandonment

| Article: 4 min read | Conversion, Increase conversion

Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds products to an online store's cart but leaves without placing an order. The cart abandonment rate shows what percentage of created carts never became an order.

In plain words

A person picked a product, pressed "Add to cart", maybe even started typing in the delivery details, and then closed the tab. For the store, this is the closest-to-purchase moment at which it loses the customer: the interest is already there, and something was missing in the last steps.

Some of these carts are unavoidable. People put products in the cart to compare prices, to save them, or to add up the total. Baymard Institute writes that a large share of abandoned carts is a natural result of how people browse online stores, and these cases are mostly unavoidable (Baymard). It's worth fighting for the rest: the people who wanted to buy but something got in the way.

The formula

Cart abandonment rate = (1 − orders / carts created) × 100%

This is how VWO counts it, for example: 300 carts created and 100 completed purchases give 67% (Wingify/VWO).

A hypothetical example for a Ukrainian store. In a month, a clothing store has 4,000 sessions with an add-to-cart and 1,200 completed orders:

(1 − 1,200 / 4,000) × 100% = 70% abandoned carts.

It helps to split the funnel into steps to see exactly where people drop off: cart → checkout start → delivery choice (Nova Poshta branch, parcel locker, courier) → payment choice (card, cash on delivery) → confirmation. In GA4 these are the events `add_to_cart`, `begin_checkout`, `add_shipping_info`, `add_payment_info`, `purchase`.

Count mobile and desktop traffic separately: the problem may be in only one of the versions.

How many carts are abandoned

Baymard keeps a list of studies on abandoned carts. The average across 50 studies is 70.22% (updated September 22, 2025, data from 2006 to 2025) (Baymard). So about seven in ten carts don't become an order.

That figure is an average of studies that counted in different ways, so for your own store it's a reference point, not a norm. Compare your rate with your own trend.

Reasons according to Baymard

In the quantitative study Baymard cites (page updated in September 2025, a survey of US online shoppers; Baymard doesn't state the year of the survey itself on the page), 42% said they abandoned a cart because they were "just browsing / not ready to buy". Among the rest, the reasons were distributed like this (Baymard):

Reason

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Extra costs too high (shipping, taxes, fees)

40%

Delivery too slow

20%

Didn't trust the site with card details

19%

Site required creating an account

18%

Checkout too long or complicated

17%

Site errors or crashes

17%

Unsatisfactory return policy

13%

Couldn't see or calculate the total cost upfront

12%

Card was declined

10%

Too few payment methods

9%

The survey covers the US. For Ukraine, some of the reasons sound different: instead of taxes, it's the cost of delivery by Nova Poshta; instead of distrust of entering a card, it's the wish to pay with cash on delivery or in installments. Check the reasons with your own customers: a survey on the checkout page, session recordings, calls from managers.

What people do about it

Baymard estimates that the average large online store can raise its conversion by 35.26% by fixing checkout usability problems (Baymard). By Baymard's benchmark, 65% of 344 leading US and EU sites have "mediocre" or worse checkout usability (Baymard, Checkout Usability).

What usually helps:

  • Show the full cost as early as possible, including delivery. VWO advises clearly showing all costs on the order review page (Wingify/VWO). For a Ukrainian store, that means an estimated Nova Poshta delivery cost already on the product page or in the cart.
  • Allow checkout without registration (guest checkout).
  • Shorten the form. According to Baymard, an ideal checkout can have 12–14 form elements (7–8 fields), while the US average shows 23.48 elements (Baymard). Autosuggest for the city and branch instead of typing it by hand also cuts the number of fields.
  • Offer familiar payment methods: card, Apple Pay / Google Pay, cash on delivery, installments. According to WayForPay (Forbes Ukraine, 25.05.2026), Apple Pay and Google Pay account for about 55–65% of online payments in Ukraine, and around 60% of online purchases are made from smartphones (Forbes Ukraine): for a mobile shopper, these methods are familiar.
  • Show delivery times and return terms next to the checkout button.
  • Remove technical errors: test checkout on real phones, on slow internet, with autofill.
  • Remind people about the cart by email, messenger or push, if the person has left a contact and given consent.

The data will tell you what to fix first: at which funnel step the drop-off is largest and which reasons your shoppers name. You can verify a change with an A/B test.

Common mistakes

  • Fighting unavoidable carts. People who were only comparing prices won't be won back with pop-ups.
  • Counting only the overall rate without a breakdown by step and device.
  • Treating the American reasons as your own without checking them with Ukrainian shoppers.
  • Hiding delivery until the last step. It's the most common reason in Baymard's study.

FAQ

What is an abandoned cart? A cart to which a shopper added products but did not place an order.

How do you calculate the cart abandonment rate? (1 − number of orders / number of carts created) × 100%. For example, 1,200 orders from 4,000 carts is 70%.

What is a normal cart abandonment rate? The average across the 50 studies collected by Baymard is 70.22%. But it's better to compare with your own past periods.

Why do shoppers abandon their carts? According to Baymard, most often because of unexpected extra costs, slow delivery, distrust of the site, mandatory registration and a complicated checkout.

Sources

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