How to Calculate Cart Abandonment Rate & Use It to Your Advantage

As much as vendors dream of shops crowded with people buying everything they see, clientele frequently tends to have zero commitment to the commodities they put in their shopping carts. In the realm of e-commerce, it is true. As opposed to real shops, in online stores, users are supervised, so every frustration, misunderstanding, or absence of essential information can lead to an exit move, even if they already have something in their baskets.

Many companies choose to ignore this behavior. But you should always consider how to reduce cart abandonment. Yet, if handled properly, cart abandonment can become a wellspring of inspiration for winning customers over. Cart abandonment rate calculation is a crucial step toward recovering your lost profits.

Contents

• Defining Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
• Easy to Follow Calculation Manual
• Effortless Computations with a 3-steps Formula
• What Grading Scale to Apply When Interpreting Your Ratio
• Cart Abandonment Rate Calculation for E-Commerce

Defining Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Every day your website has visitors. Some of them browse it intentionally, and others stumble upon it accidentally. Your primary target is to ensure that as many of them as possible leave with a new possession. However, despite consumerism being one of the significant traits of modern society, people may hesitate or have a change of heart while shopping.

That is why, when you examine your statistical data, you see the figures divided into those who accessed the site, clicked on the product page, added something to the cart, started the checkout process, and placed orders. Each of these categories has its value. Still, the number of potential clients who intended to acquire something but dropped out instead can be crucial to understanding your shortcomings and fixing them.

Despite the general scarcity of attention to this phenomenon, analysts study this subject. They invented the term to describe the situation when visitors browse the site and add things to the cart but then click the exit button, saying farewell to all the objects in the basket.   

Of course, cart abandonment is a multidimensional concept that deserves to be explored. So, you can read about it here, if you’re invested in this topic.

The index that reveals how many opened carts were never converted into the actual transactions also deserves its definition. 

If this ratio surpasses the average point, which, as stated by Baymard Institute, constitutes 69.82%, it’s an alert. Something troubles your visitors, and although they would like to obtain something from you, it prevents them from doing so. You deserve praise for doing an excellent job if the metric is lower. However, a successful entrepreneur will not miss a chance to seize an opportunity for further development.

Overall, it’s an important measurement because it permits you to pass a realistic judgment on the situation and determine the correct ways to address it. It’s the first step towards creating an action plan to regain the lost revenue and motivate vendees to complete purchases more often.

This route is a challenging journey toward improvement that incorporates several stages and techniques. You can learn more about this complex process here.

The shopping cart abandonment rate not only signals that something is malfunctioning but also designates the extent of your success in sorting out your issues. If the ratio moves up the scale, your tactics are prolific.  

Easy to Follow Calculation Manual

Cart abandonment rate calculation can be performed manually or with special analytical software, such as Google Analytics.

If you dismiss platforms for data analysis because of the expensive price, inconvenience, or simple disaffection, grab a pen and a piece of paper/open a program to execute mathematical operations (e.g., Microsoft Excel), and follow this algorithm:

1. Find out how many shopping carts were opened during the particular period.
2. Define the number of them that transformed into orders.
3. Divide the first variable by the second variable.
4. Subtract this number from one.
5. Multiply the result by a hundred.

Let’s illustrate this sequence with an example for better understanding, visualization, and practice. For instance, your store’s statistics look like this:

1. 73 000 visitors;
2. 61 000 users with opened baskets;
3. 16 000 shoppers who finished the checkout.

Use these figures to perform the following actions:

1. 16 000/61 000=0.26
2. 1-0.26=0.74
3. 0.74*100=74

The digits show that your shoppers neglected 74% of their baskets.

If you need more detailed approach, have a busy schedule, or prefer when software does the job for you, you can turn to Google Analytics. However, the basic version does not render reports with this metric, so you have to change it to Enhanced Ecommerce.

Open Shopping Behavior Analysis & Checkout Behavior Analysis reports. The first one will show the total number and percentage of abandoned carts, explicitly pointing out the portion that happened during the checkout process. To obtain a profound view of checkout abandonment, you should examine the second one.

To access these reports:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Go to the Admin panel.
3. Select the View section.
4. Open Reports category.
5. Proceed with Conversions and then Ecommerce.

Shopping Behavior Analysis Report. Retrieved from Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce manual.

If you do not have the desire to turn on Enhanced Ecommerce, you can create a calculated metric for it in Universal Analytics (Admin > View > Calculated metrics > New calculated metric). All you have to do is:

1. Name the KPI.
2. Select the formatting type (percentage).
3. Enter the sequence of the operations.
4. Fill the fields with variables and constants.

Effortless Computations with a 3-steps Formula

Now that you’ve understood how to calculate the cart abandonment rate, it’s time to deduce its formula. The sequence of operations you’ve executed can be narrowed to this definition:

The cart abandonment rate formula allows you to obtain the two significant indicators indispensable to forming a comprehensive view of your website. When analyzed together, shopping cart abandonment and conversion rates permit you to realize your state's gravity, grasp its motivation, and forecast its possible implications. 

Cart Conversion Rate

It provides you with the percentage of deals you’ve struck over a certain period. This metric is a proportion of the number of orders you received versus the number of established baskets.

This measurement is crucial because it shows how successful you are in inducing customers to get things from you. It also reflects your progress in terms of achieving your goals.

If you take the statistics of the imaginary shop we analyzed previously, you’ll see that its conversion rate equals 26% because:

1. 16 000/61 000=0.26
2. 0.26*100=26

Cart Abandonment Rate

So, you know the ratio of opened carts that received the “order” status. Logically, you can figure out the percentage of unfinished purchases.

Example:

1. 1-0.26=0.74
2. 0.74*100=74

Hence, our fictional online marketplace's shopping cart abandonment rate is 74%. 

What Grading Scale to Apply When Interpreting Your Ratio

The shopping cart abandonment rate can be informative when analyzing customers’ behavior or brainstorming viable strategies for amending your website’s performance. Still, without a coherent attitude to its interpretation, it provides no help with assessing the situation. 

Obtaining a cart abandonment rate calculation skill is only sufficient once you learn how to view this measurement in coherence with multiple factors and other major KPIs. Thus, let’s explore the most effective methods of turning a useless figure into a powerful tool.     

Compare It to the Average Cart Abandonment Rate

Naturally, the best practice to evaluate your performance is to weigh it up against the results of your competitors. You already discovered that the average cart abandonment rate in the e-commerce sector is 69.82%, based on thorough research conducted by Baymard Institute that amalgamates 46 studies devoted to this subject.

If your rating is below the average value, you might have minor issues to address, but on the whole, your current policy on stimulating shoppers to buy from you is successful. When the metric outreaches the average level, it is a wake-up call for you to start developing a blueprint for your recovery. 

However,  it would be too simple if there were no other circumstances you should consider. So, the average cart abandonment rate may fluctuate vastly between industries because acquiring expensive objects requires more thoughtful decision-making than shopping for essentials, such as food or housewares.

Therefore, let’s put the data collected by Statista into practice and get a more detailed look at our imaginary store’s statistics.

Shopping cart abandonment rate by industries in March 2021. Retrieved from Statista.

Variant 1.

If: This shop helps to search for and get plane tickets. The average abandonment rate in the airplane sector is approximately 80%.

Then: The verdict should be “good”.

Variant 2.

If: The marketplace sells groceries. The average abandonment rate across this industry is around 60%.

Then: The judicial statement is “bad”.

To know more about how cart abandonment affects a particular industry, you can read our article on cart abandonment in retail.   

Bring Other Factors into the Equation

According to Econsultancy's report, published by Marketing Charts, only 26% of companies exert efforts to bring back users who fled their website, which is a mistake. They could reach an 18%–53% recovery rate if they attempted to retarget this demographic. 

But what incentives can business owners use to lure customers back? It depends directly on the motivation behind the cart abandonment. 

Post-abandonment shopping cart recovery rate. Retrieved from Marketing Charts.

Baymard Institute analyzed more than a dozen reasons for cart abandonment. They concluded that even though vague motives, such as “I was just browsing/not ready to buy” are challenging to address, there is a plethora of causes that could be resolved without time-consuming or expensive measures, like unoptimized checkout flow, lack of shipping or payment options, software glitches, and preliminary design.    

The most common reasons for abandoning online shopping carts in 2021. Retrieved from Baymard Institute.

If you pick a complex approach to interpreting your shopping cart abandonment rate, you can discover the roots of customers’ dropouts. Here are some of the most valuable indicators regarding cart abandonment analysis other than conversion rate. 

Shopping Behavior

A path to software:

• Enhanced Ecommerce.

A strategy to make it a helpful tool:

• Monitor the parameters like the total number of visits, sessions with no shopping activity, add to cart & checkout actions, and add to cart/checkout abandonment.
• Determine which funnel’s stages are potentially problematic.

Checkout Behavior

A path to software:

• Google Analytics (Enhanced Ecommerce).

A method to make it a helpful tool:

• Review the checkout process step-by-step to find out when the dropouts tend to occur.

Average Order Value (AOV)

A path to software:

• Ecommerce.

A strategy to make it a helpful tool:

• Use the average total price of products and services in the customer's cart to calculate how grave the situation is regarding revenue loss.

Site Speed

A path to software:

• Site Speed.

A method to make it a helpful tool:

• Discover if your site is fast enough in such vital aspects as execution speed & page-load time.
• Explore the suggestions to improve these characteristics.

Goal Flow

A path to software:

• Goal Flow.

A strategy to make it a helpful tool:

• Design funnels with shopping cart and checkout pages as goals to determine the pages that spark more enthusiasm among visitors.
• Review the pages that display a low level of people’s engagement to find the elements that need improvement.

User Explorer

A path to software:

• User Explorer.

A method to make it a helpful tool:

• Investigate the shopping behavioral patterns of a particular user to find inspiration for your remarketing campaign.
• See what the person browsed, viewed, bought, or added to the cart, but didn’t purchase to remind about the cart contents, offer complimentary items, and come up with personalized recommendations.

Indeed, the benefits of gathering and analyzing statistical data are hard to underestimate. Yet, sometimes it is better to ask the audience directly, and there is nothing more suitable for this purpose than pop-up messages. Use Claspo, a simple and functional pop-up builder, to develop creative and friendly feedback forms that visitors can quickly fill in when they express an intent to close the site.

You can use a NOVASOL message to illustrate a pop-up feedback form.      

Cart Abandonment Rate Calculation for E-commerce

The cart abandonment rate calculation is the ultimate way to assess the negative effects of shopping cart abandonment and the impact on your platform’s performance. Although its formula doesn’t involve any complicated mathematical operations, the digits alone will not allow you to see the whole picture.

Thus, it should be interpreted together with other influential factors, such as your industry’s average ratio, conversion rate, site speed, average order value, or users’ behavioral patterns. A systematic approach to the metric’s analysis will help you understand what prevents people from placing orders or grant you ideas and insights for your action plan.