Cart Abandonment

Conversion & UX

Also: Shopping Cart Abandonment · Basket Abandonment

Cart Abandonment Rate = (1 - Completed Purchases / Initiated Checkouts) x 100

Industry averageTypically 70%+ abandon rate

RecoveryEmail sequences recover 5 to 15% of abandoners

Quick winSimplify checkout to reduce abandonment

Top causesUnexpected costs, forced account creation, slow load

Quick definition

Cart abandonment occurs when a shopper adds products to an online shopping cart but leaves without completing the purchase. The cart abandonment rate measures the percentage of initiated checkouts that do not result in a sale, and recovery strategies attempt to bring those shoppers back.

How it varies across Australia

Cart abandonment rates above 70% are typical across Australian e-commerce. Businesses with streamlined checkout flows, transparent shipping costs displayed early and active cart recovery email sequences consistently achieve higher completion rates than category benchmarks.

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Why shoppers abandon carts

Unexpected Costs

Shipping fees, taxes and fees revealed only at checkout are the leading cause of abandonment. Show total cost as early as possible in the shopping journey.

Top abandonment cause

Forced Account Creation

Requiring shoppers to create an account before purchasing creates friction for first-time buyers. Guest checkout is the standard expectation and its absence causes meaningful drop-off.

Friction barrier

Slow or Complex Checkout

Too many steps, too many form fields or a slow-loading checkout page all increase abandonment. The benchmark for a well-optimised checkout is three steps or fewer.

UX friction

Browsing Intent

Not all cart additions signal purchase intent. Some shoppers add items to save them for later, compare prices, or check shipping costs. These will never convert regardless of recovery tactics.

Inherent rate floor

What it actually means

A high cart abandonment rate means that a significant proportion of your most engaged visitors — people who found a product they wanted enough to add to their cart — are not completing the purchase.

Cart abandonment rate is calculated as: 1 minus (completed purchases divided by initiated checkouts), expressed as a percentage. A rate of 75% means three-quarters of people who started a checkout did not finish it.

There are two categories of intervention: prevention (making checkout so frictionless that fewer people abandon) and recovery (bringing abandoners back to complete the purchase after they have left).

Prevention is typically higher value. Reducing your abandonment rate from 75% to 65% is worth more in recovered revenue than sending an email sequence that converts 10% of the abandoned carts.

Recovery is easier to implement. Most email platforms support abandoned cart email flows triggered by checkout initiation without completion. A well-designed sequence of two to three emails sent over 24 to 72 hours typically recovers 5 to 15% of abandoners.

Cart abandonment is not a failure of marketing. It is a signal about your checkout experience. The email sequence recovers some of it. The checkout redesign prevents most of it.

How it shows up

Cart abandonment rate appears in your e-commerce analytics platform. In GA4, it is visible in the purchase funnel report (Monetisation section) as the drop-off between 'Add to cart' and 'Begin checkout' and between 'Begin checkout' and 'Purchase'. In your email platform, abandoned cart flow performance shows as sent, open, click and revenue-recovered metrics.

The Australian context

In Australia, buy now pay later (BNPL) options like Afterpay and Zip have a material impact on cart abandonment for higher-value purchases. Displaying BNPL options early — on the product page rather than only at checkout — reduces sticker shock and can lower abandonment rates for orders above $100. Australian shoppers have among the highest rates of BNPL adoption globally.

Where people get this wrong

Treating all abandoned carts as recoverableA meaningful proportion of cart additions are research behaviour — price comparison, saving for later, checking shipping costs. These shoppers never intended to buy in this session. Abandonment rates have an inherent floor regardless of how good your checkout or recovery emails are.

Starting with recovery emails before fixing checkout frictionRecovery emails return a fraction of abandoners. Checkout optimisation prevents abandonment in the first place. The higher-leverage intervention is fixing the checkout experience — fewer steps, clearer cost disclosure, faster load time — before investing in recovery.

Sending a single recovery email and calling it doneA single recovery email typically converts 3 to 5% of abandoners. A three-email sequence typically converts 5 to 15%. The second and third emails, sent at 12 and 48 hours, catch shoppers who were distracted rather than decided against purchasing.

Common questions

What is a good cart abandonment rate?

Cart abandonment rates consistently sit above 70% across most e-commerce categories. Rates below 65% indicate a well-optimised checkout experience. Rates above 80% suggest significant friction in the checkout process. Context matters: high-AOV (high average order value) categories like furniture and electronics tend to have higher abandonment because purchase decisions are more considered.

Should I offer a discount in my cart abandonment email?

Not in the first email. The first email should be a helpful reminder with a clear link back to the cart — no offer. Many shoppers abandon due to distraction, not price objection, and they will return without an incentive. Save the discount for the third email if the shopper has not returned after two follow-ups. Offering a discount in the first email trains shoppers to abandon carts intentionally to receive a discount code.

Does cart abandonment tracking require cookies?

Traditional cart abandonment email flows require a shopper to have provided their email address at some point — either as a subscriber or at the start of checkout. Anonymous abandoners (who have never given their email) cannot be reached by email. Retargeting ads can reach anonymous abandoners via cookie-based or hashed-audience targeting, though post-iOS 14 tracking limitations have reduced the accuracy of this approach.

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About New Rebellion

New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.

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