Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment happens when a customer adds items to their online shopping cart but leaves the ordering process before completing the purchase and paying. The cart abandonment rate measures the share of these started-but-unfinished orders and is a key metric for conversion optimisation in e-commerce.
Cart abandonment describes the situation in which a visitor to an online shop places one or more items in the shopping cart but abandons the ordering process before the order is bindingly completed and paid for. The customer thereby signals a basic intent to buy, yet leaves the shop somewhere during checkout – whether on the cart page, while entering address and shipping details or right before payment. Unlike a mere page visit without any product interaction, cart abandonment matters particularly because a concrete purchase intent already existed and the revenue was only just missed.
The phenomenon is measured via the cart abandonment rate: it indicates what share of the carts created does not turn into a completed order. Across industries this rate has for years sat at roughly 65 to 75 percent – so a considerable part of potential revenue is lost at the very last step. Cart abandonment is therefore one of the most important levers of conversion optimisation and a key indicator of the quality of checkout, price transparency and the payment process.
At a glance
- Cart abandonment = a purchase started but not completed in the online shop
- Abandonment rate is usually 65–75% of created carts across industries
- Most common causes: unexpected extra costs, forced account registration, cumbersome checkout
- Countermeasures: transparent costs, guest checkout, many payment methods, recovery emails
- Distinct from checkout and browse abandonment – each funnel step counts separately
What exactly is cart abandonment?
We speak of cart abandonment as soon as a user starts the ordering process with a filled cart but does not carry it through to the order confirmation. The customer has thus taken the first step of the purchase intent – selected the goods and added them to the cart – but then abandons the process without paying. The cart remains in the system (for logged-in customers often stored across sessions) but leads to no binding order.
Economically, cart abandonment is so significant because the most expensive hurdle – sparking interest and getting the customer to the cart – has already been cleared. Losing the customer at this point incurs marketing and traffic costs without generating revenue. Even small improvements to checkout and the payment process can therefore mean noticeably more completed orders, without having to buy additional traffic.
How the cart abandonment rate is calculated
The cart abandonment rate is obtained by dividing the number of completed orders by the number of carts created, multiplying the result by 100 and subtracting the value from 100 percent. Example: if 1,000 carts are created in a period but only 280 orders are completed, the abandonment rate is 72 percent (1 − 280/1,000). A clean distinction is important: not every "add to cart" is a genuine purchase intent – carts used for price comparison or as a wish list distort the metric and should be taken into account when interpreting it.
Why customers abandon the cart
The causes of cart abandonment are well researched and remarkably constant across many shops. In first place come unexpected extra costs: if shipping, packaging, taxes or service fees only become visible at the last step, a large share of customers drops off. Also heavily weighted are a forced customer account (no guest checkout), an overly long or complicated ordering process, a lack of trust when entering payment data, and missing or unsuitable payment methods.
On top of this come technical and content-related reasons: long loading times, checkout errors, unclear delivery times, an unsatisfactory return or refund policy, or simply too high a final price. Some abandonments are also never "fixable", because many users deliberately use the cart as a wish list, for price comparison or for a later purchase decision. The art lies in separating the avoidable abandonments from this natural browsing behaviour.
Reducing cart abandonment – countermeasures
The most effective starting point is price transparency: shipping and additional costs should be visible as early as possible – ideally already on the product or cart page – so that no surprise arises at checkout. A lean, short ordering process with guest checkout, few mandatory fields and a clear progress bar lowers the abandonment rate, as does a broad choice of familiar payment methods (invoice, PayPal, credit card, direct debit, pay by invoice).
Trust signals such as quality seals, visible reviews and a transparent returns and privacy statement have an additional effect. Technically, fast loading times, a flawless mobile display and saved carts pay into conversion. For abandonments that have already occurred, automated recovery measures have become established: "cart reminder emails" (abandoned-cart emails) to logged-in customers as well as retargeting ads bring back some of the abandoners – legally, in the DACH region, only with valid consent.
DACH specifics: law and payment preferences
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, stricter rules apply to re-engaging cart abandoners than in many other markets. Promotional reminder emails generally require explicit consent under the GDPR and the German Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG); retargeting via tracking cookies requires consent in the consent banner. At the same time, the DACH region has its own payment habits that shape abandonment behaviour: buying on invoice (pay by invoice) is especially popular here, and its absence is a frequent, often underestimated reason for abandonment. A suitable payment-method portfolio is therefore not just about comfort but a direct conversion lever.
Cart abandonment in the ERP system
Cart abandonment itself arises in the shop system, not in the ERP – yet the connection between the two systems is decisive for avoiding and evaluating abandonments. A central factor is availability: when the ERP reports the actual stock to the shop in real time, the customer sees reliable delivery and availability information. Nothing drives the abandonment rate more than an item that suddenly turns out to be unavailable at checkout, or an oversell that cancels the order after the fact.
Equally important is the smooth handover of completed orders: as soon as the customer has paid, the order should flow from the shop into the ERP without any media break and trigger order processing there. The faster and more reliably this process runs, the more credible the delivery times stated at checkout – and the less often the customer abandons out of uncertainty. Some ERP and multichannel systems also evaluate carts that were created but not completed and use them to trigger recovery processes.
Stock synchronisation as a conversion factor
Especially in multichannel retail, where the same goods are sold via shop, marketplaces and in-store, cross-channel stock synchronisation is a direct lever against abandonment. If the ERP manages the available stock centrally and feeds it back to all channels in real time, the shop always shows correct availabilities. This prevents both frustration over seemingly unavailable items and subsequent cancellations due to oversells – both typical triggers of lost trust and later abandonment.
Distinction: cart abandonment vs. checkout and browse abandonment
Cart abandonment is often mixed up with related terms that actually refer to different funnel steps. Browse abandonment describes visitors who look at products but add nothing to the cart – here the concrete purchase intent is still missing. Cart abandonment only begins once an item is in the cart and the purchase is not completed.
More narrowly defined is checkout abandonment: it counts only the users who have already started the actual ordering process – i.e. entering address or payment data – and then leave it. Checkout abandonment is thus a subset of cart abandonment and particularly meaningful, because the purchase intent was highest here. For optimisation it pays to break the funnel down into these stages and examine each source of abandonment individually, rather than tracking only an overall rate.
Example
Example: fashion retailer lowers its abandonment rate through process analysis
A mid-sized online fashion retailer observes a cart abandonment rate of 78 percent – well above the industry average. A funnel analysis shows that most customers only drop off on the last checkout page, as soon as the shipping costs become visible, and that the shop does not allow a purchase to be completed without a customer account. Both are classic, avoidable reasons for abandonment.
Going forward, the retailer displays the shipping costs already on the cart page, introduces a guest checkout and adds pay by invoice as a payment method. In addition, logged-in abandoners are brought back with a consented reminder email. In parallel, the real-time stock connection from the ERP ensures that no order has to be cancelled after the fact due to a lack of availability. Within a few months the abandonment rate falls to 68 percent – with unchanged traffic, this corresponds to a noticeable revenue increase.
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