Cart Abandonment Rate Calculator

Background.

Roughly seven in every ten online shopping carts are left without an order. Baymard Institute averages 50 published studies to a documented cart abandonment rate of 70.22%, though the studies behind that average disagree with one another by about ten percentage points, partly because they do not all count a cart the same way.

That definitional looseness is the first thing to settle when you measure your own store. Abandonment counted from every cart created and abandonment counted only from shoppers who started checking out are two different statistics. Google Analytics 4 names the stages with its recommended e-commerce events: add_to_cart, which it says signifies that an item was added to a cart for purchase; begin_checkout, when a user has begun a checkout; and purchase. Divide by the first and you get cart abandonment; divide by the second and you get checkout abandonment, which is always the smaller number because everyone in it has already shown more intent. Quoting a checkout figure against a cart-level benchmark flatters a store that may be losing most of its shoppers before checkout ever loads.

Enter carts, checkouts and orders for one period and both rates come back together, along with how many shoppers dropped out at each stage and, if you add an order value, what the abandoned carts held.

Read that money with care. In Baymard's survey 42% of US online shoppers said they had abandoned a cart because they were just browsing or not ready to buy, and no recovery email turns a browser into a buyer. The reasons that can be fixed come further down the same list: extra costs too high (40%), delivery too slow (20%), not trusting the site with card details (19%), being made to create an account (18%) and a checkout that was too long or complicated (17%).

What is cart abandonment rate calculator?

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of shopping carts created in a period that did not end in a purchase. Checkout abandonment rate is the same calculation started from a later point in the funnel, the carts whose owners began checking out. Between them sits the cart-to-checkout rate, the share of carts that reached checkout at all. The three describe a two-stage funnel, and the share of carts that convert equals the product of the two stage pass-through rates.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Take carts created, checkouts started and purchases from the same report and the same date range. In GA4 these are the add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase counts; count carts or sessions, not individual items added.
2. 02Leave out orders that never passed through a cart, such as phone, in-store or manually invoiced sales. Purchases cannot exceed checkouts, and checkouts cannot exceed carts, so an error here usually means mismatched periods or orders from another channel.
3. 03For the money figures, enter an average order value. If your analytics can report the average value of abandoned carts, that is the better number; completed-order value tends to overstate what abandoned carts held.
4. 04Enter the recovery rate you expect, ideally the share of abandoned carts your own reminder emails or retargeting have actually converted. Leave it at 0 if you only want the rates.
5. 05Compare the drop-out before checkout with the drop-out inside it, in shoppers rather than percentages, before deciding which stage to work on.

The formula.

With C carts created, B checkouts started and P purchases: cart abandonment = (1 − P ÷ C) × 100, checkout abandonment = (1 − P ÷ B) × 100, and cart-to-checkout = B ÷ C × 100. The three are tied together. A cart converts only if it reaches checkout and then completes it, so P ÷ C = (B ÷ C) × (P ÷ B); if your figures break that identity they are not describing the same funnel. Abandoned carts are C − P, split into C − B lost before checkout and B − P lost inside it. The value in abandoned carts is (C − P) × average order value, and the recoverable figure is that value times your recovery rate. Both money figures are ceilings on what could be won back, not forecasts, because they price every abandoned cart as if its owner had meant to buy. Purchases of zero are allowed and simply give 100% abandonment; carts or checkouts of zero are not, since a rate needs something to divide by.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Baymard Institute, "50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics" (current edition, most recent underlying study retrieved by Baymard in August 2025; page retrieved by us 2026-07-29). Source of the headline context figure — "70.22 % – average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate … an average calculated based on 50 different studies" — and of the reasons data: "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'", followed by extra costs too high 40%, delivery too slow 20%, card-security distrust 19% and forced account creation 18%. Independent research institute publishing both its own study and a documented meta-average of others; the underlying studies are individually listed with dates and disagree with one another by roughly ten percentage points. Publicly accessible.
2. [2]Google, "GA4 recommended events" developer reference (current edition, retrieved 2026-07-29). Defines the three funnel stages this calculator uses: add_to_cart — "This event signifies that an item was added to a cart for purchase"; begin_checkout — "This event signifies that a user has begun a checkout"; purchase — "This event signifies when one or more items is purchased by a user". Consulted as an independent second authority on where the funnel boundaries sit; it agrees with Baymard's cart-versus-checkout distinction and supplies the event names to pull the counts from. Publicly accessible.
3. [3]Kukar-Kinney, M. & Close, A. G. (2010). "The determinants of consumers' online shopping cart abandonment." Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38(2), 240–250, DOI 10.1007/s11747-009-0141-5. The foundational peer-reviewed study of why online carts are abandoned, including the finding that carts are widely used for purposes other than immediate purchase. Bibliographic record verified against Crossref 2026-07-29 (authors, journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI all confirmed); the abstract and full text are paywalled and were not retrieved, so no verbatim figure is attributed to it here — the 42% browsing figure used on this page comes from Baymard above.
4. [4]Kukar-Kinney, M., Scheinbaum, A. C., Orimoloye, L. O., Carlson, J. R. & He, H. (2022). "A model of online shopping cart abandonment: evidence from e-tail clickstream data." Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50(5), 961–980, DOI 10.1007/s11747-022-00857-8. The modern clickstream successor to the 2010 study, offered as further reading on abandonment behaviour. Bibliographic record verified against Crossref 2026-07-29; full text paywalled and not retrieved, so no figure is attributed to it.