Glossary · Conversion
What is cart abandonment?
Cart abandonment is a shopper adding items to a cart and leaving without buying. Baymard Institute’s average of published studies puts the documented rate at about 70%, and the reason shoppers cite most often in checkout research is unexpected extra cost: shipping, taxes or fees appearing later than they expected.
- Reviewed 6 October 2026
In more detail
A high abandonment rate is not by itself a defect. Many carts are used as a shortlist, and that behaviour is normal. What matters is the portion abandoned for a reason you control and could remove.
Cost surprise is the most addressable of those reasons, because it is a content change rather than an engineering project. Stating the shipping cost, or the free-shipping threshold, before the cart is one of the few changes that reliably moves the number.
The next most addressable causes are forced account creation and a checkout that asks for information the shopper does not think you need.
Key points
- About 70% documented average across published studies (Baymard Institute).
- Unexpected extra cost is the reason cited most often in checkout research.
- Some abandonment is normal shortlisting and is not recoverable.
- Stating the shipping cost before the cart is the cheapest real intervention.
How Liftable relates
Sources
- Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics. Aggregates published studies to a documented average online cart abandonment rate of about 70%, and reports extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees) as the most common reason shoppers give for abandoning a checkout.
Questions
What is a normal cart abandonment rate?
Published research aggregated by Baymard Institute puts the documented average cart abandonment rate at about 70%. Your own figure matters more than the average: the useful question is what share of your abandonment has a cause you can name and remove.
Related terms
Guides that go deeper
- Checkout & cart · 5 minWhy shoppers abandon carts, and which reasons you can fixCart abandonment averages about 70% in Baymard’s research. Which share is normal shopping behaviour, which you can remove, and the fixes in cost order.Read
- Checkout & cart · 3 minDiagnosing checkout drop-off when you can’t see the checkoutShopify’s hosted checkout can’t be recorded, so most checkout problems are diagnosed from the events and the pages before it. A method that works within that.Read
- Buying CRO · 4 minKlaviyo and Liftable: what the connection reads, and what it can draftWhat Liftable’s Klaviyo connection asks for and why, how a recovery flow is created as a draft that waits for your approval, and how to connect or disconnect.Read
Last reviewed against the product on 6 October 2026.
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