What Is Cart Abandonment? Before vs. During Checkout

Don't confuse this with cart abandonment rate, a metric for the share of carts that end without an order. Cart abandonment is the behavior behind it.

Before vs. During Checkout

Shoppers can leave before they ever reach checkout, or get into checkout and leave before paying. The second one is called checkout abandonment.

Across 958 Shopify stores and about 2 million carts in our data, 76.04% of carts were abandoned. 58% of carts never started checkout, and 43% of shoppers who started it didn't finish. Full numbers are in our Shopify cart abandonment statistics.

Example: a candle shop's 200 carts

Say a candle shop gets 200 carts in a week and matches those averages.

116 carts (58%) never reach checkout.
84 shoppers start checkout. About 36 of them (43%) leave.
About 48 carts become orders.

That's 152 abandoned carts, or 76% of 200.

What Shopify Shows (and Misses)

In your Shopify admin, Abandoned checkouts sits under Orders, and it only lists people who reached checkout. For the candle shop, that's 36 carts at most. The other 116 never created a checkout.

Shopify's analytics can count sessions that added to cart and sessions that reached checkout. Most abandonment hides in between.

Why It Hits Your Conversion Rate

Someone with a full cart has already picked a product. In our data, only about 8 in 100 sessions reach the cart, and about 2 end in an order. This is where you lose most of the people closest to buying.

If the candle shop won back 10 of its 152 abandoned carts, it'd have 58 orders, not 48. That's about 21% more orders from the same traffic.

Myth: Every Abandoned Cart Is a Lost Sale

Some shoppers use the cart as a wish list or to see the total with shipping. Others come back later and buy on their own. Send them all a discount and you may pay people who'd have bought at full price. Do that often, and some buyers may learn to leave a cart and wait for a code.

So it's worth telling dedicated buyers and walk-away customers apart. Our app, Growth Suite, uses behavior like cart activity to predict purchase intent. It shows its time-limited offers only to visitors it sees as less likely to buy.

Our full guide to cart abandonment on Shopify goes deeper. Choosing a tool to win carts back? Compare the best cart abandonment apps for Shopify.

Related Terms

Browse Abandonment: viewing products and leaving without adding any to the cart.
Cart Recovery: bringing shoppers back to buy what they left.
Dedicated Buyer: a high-intent shopper likely to buy without a nudge.
Discount Fatigue: when shoppers wait for a discount before buying.