50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026

Based on the data we collected, weve calculated the average cart abandonment rate of 70.22%. This value is an average calculated based on 50 different studies containing statistics on ecommerce shopping cart abandonment.

Why Users Abandon Their Cart

Now in all fairness to the ecommerce industry, a large portion of cart abandonments are simply a natural consequence of how users browse ecommerce sites many users will be doing window shopping, price comparison, saving items for later, exploring gift options, etc. These are largely unavoidable cart and checkout abandonments.
In fact, our latest quantitative study of reasons for abandonment found that 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because I was just browsing / not ready to buy.

Unlike the just browsing segment, a lot of these issues can be resolved. In fact, many of them can be fixed purely through design changes. Lets take a look at just 1 of 140 examples in our new checkout research study:

• 17% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order due to a too long / complicated checkout process.
• Now, our large-scale checkout usability testing shows that an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12-14 form elements (7-8 if only counting the form fields).
• Yet, our checkout benchmark database reveals that the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements displayed to users by default. (14.88 if only counting the form fields.)

In other words, nearly 1 out of 5 shoppers have abandoned a cart due to a too long / complicated checkout process, yet for most checkouts its possible to make a 20-60% reduction in the number of form elements shown to users during the default checkout flow. And again, this is just 1 of the 140 documented causes for checkout usability issues.

The Effects of Shopping Cart Abandonment: $260 Billion are Recoverable

If we focus only on checkout usability issues which we during the past 10 years of large-scale checkout testing at Baymard Institute have documented to be solvable, the average large-sized ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate though better checkout design. And that is despite testing the checkout flows of large ecommerce sites in the US and EU, such as Walmart, Amazon, Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, ASOS, etc.

If we look at the combined ecommerce sales of $738 billion in the US and EU, the potential for a 35.26% increase in conversion rate translates to $260 billion worth of lost orders which are recoverable solely through a better checkout flow & design.

Now, achieving such gains won't come easy. But even when we audit leading Fortune 500 companies, who've already run a couple of checkout optimization projects, we find that major gains are still possible. And the potential is big: our benchmark of the checkout flows of 60 leading ecommerce sites show the average site has 39 potential areas for checkout improvements.

Learn more about our full checkout research findings.