50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026

Based on the data we collected, we’ve 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.

Cart abandonment rate over time

The documented cart abandonment rate has hovered around 70% for over a decade. Each dot is one study.

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”.

However, if we ignore the “just browsing” segment, and instead look at the remaining reasons for abandonments we get the following distribution:

• 40% Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees)
• 20% Delivery was too slow
• 19% I didn't trust the site with my credit card information
• 18% The site wanted me to create an account
• 17% Too long / complicated checkout process
• 17% Website had errors / crashed
• 13% Returns policy wasn't satisfactory
• 12% I couldn't see / calculate total order cost up-front
• 10% The credit card was declined
• 9% There weren't enough payment methods
• 7% I don’t know

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. Let’s 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 it’s 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.

Frequently asked questions

All 50 abandonment rate statistics

Last updated Oct 28, 2026.

Why this list?

We created this list because we needed some abandonment statistics ourselves for our Ecommerce Checkout Usability study and articles.

When searching for these statistics we found a myriad of articles citing the same sources, as well as large fluctuations in the actual abandonment rates. So to save you and ourselves that hassle we decided to gather all statistics in a single place.

How we calculate it

We include published studies that report an overall ecommerce cart abandonment rate. The average is the plain, unweighted mean of every study listed. We add new studies as they’re published.

Know of any cart abandonment statistics not on this list? Then send an email to support@baymard.com and we’ll review it for the next update.