Cart Abandonment Rate
Of the shoppers who put something in the cart, the share who left without buying.
The fork, why two teams get different numbers
The widely quoted "~70% of carts are abandoned" figure hides three different
metrics. CART abandonment counts anyone who added an item and did not purchase.
CHECKOUT abandonment counts only those who STARTED checkout (entered the funnel,
began filling shipping/payment) and did not finish, a much smaller, higher-
intent denominator, so its abandonment rate is lower. BROWSE abandonment is a
third thing (viewed a product, never added). Analytics vendors and the storefront
each pick one and call it "abandonment," so two dashboards report 68% and 24% for
the same store and both are correct.
The trap
Carts are cheap to create and full of noise: bots, price-checkers, wishlist-by- proxy shoppers, and one human opening three carts across devices all inflate the cart denominator, pushing cart-abandonment toward a scary number that no checkout fix can move.
- The full trap, worked on a real export
- Every formula variant, spelled out
- The reconciliation anchor, what to tie it to and when to refuse
Reference: E-commerce funnel measurement convention · Baymard-style checkout-UX research (reference)