Cart abandonment calculator — cart and checkout are two different numbers
Last reviewed: 28 July 2026. Every benchmark below carries its publisher and its date — the Dynamic Yield figures re-render every month.
Prefilled with Dynamic Yield's own worked example — 850 carts, 200 purchases. Their page rounds it to 76%; two decimals make it 76.47%. Replace with your own numbers.
Cart abandonment
76.47%
1 − (200 ÷ 850) × 100
- Completion
- 23.53%
- Carts you didn't convert
- 650
What walked
—
Add your average order value to price the gap.
Where this rate is measured from
purchases ÷ carts created- 850 Carts created the denominator
- — Checkout started not measured here
- 200 Purchases
- 200 converted · 23.53%
- 650 abandoned · 76.47%
Where your rate sits
1.07 points below this figure
Dynamic Yield · their customer base · rolling 12 mo · read 28 Jul 2026
6.25 points above this figure
Baymard · average of 50 documented studies · page updated 22 Sep 2025
Between the two published figures — they measure different things (third-party studies vs one vendor's live customer base), and sitting between them is normal.
Cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are different numbers, and most calculators conflate them. Cart abandonment divides completed purchases by every cart created. Checkout abandonment divides by the sessions that began checkout — a smaller denominator, measuring a later failure. Same store, same week: two rates that can sit twenty points apart, both correct. Pick the boundary first. The maths is one subtraction.
The calculator
Two fields give you the rate in either mode. Add your average order value and it prices the gap: the carts you didn't convert × AOV. That output is arithmetic, not a forecast — it's what walked, not what a recovery email gets back.
Cart vs checkout abandonment
Cart abandonment counts from the cart. Dynamic Yield by Mastercard defines it as "the process in which a consumer adds an item to the cart but leaves the site without completing checkout," and publishes the formula: "Identify the total number of completed purchases that have occurred over a fixed period of time (i.e. one month) and divide it by the number of shopping carts created within the same period. Subtract this number from 1, and then multiply the result by 100." Their worked example: "if 200 people completed purchases this week and 850 carts were created, the shopping cart abandonment rate would be 76%" (marketing.dynamicyield.com, read 28 Jul 2026). The calculator ships prefilled with that example.
Checkout abandonment counts from the checkout: 1 − (completed purchases ÷ sessions that began checkout) × 100. No publisher defines this rate — the construction is this page's own, built on a field Shopify already reports: "Sessions that reached checkout — Online store visits that reached checkout relative to total visits" (help.shopify.com, read 28 Jul 2026). Same numerator, later denominator.
The gap between the two is everyone who built a cart and never started checkout. Fix your checkout and judge it by cart abandonment, and most of the number you're staring at never touched the thing you fixed. One metric per boundary. If your problem sits a step earlier — getting anything into the cart at all — start from your add-to-cart rate.
What a normal rate is
Two citable figures exist for cart abandonment, and they measure different objects. Don't average them, and don't read them as agreeing or disagreeing.
| Source | Figure | What it actually is | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baymard Institute | 70.22% | "Average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate" — an average calculated from 50 published studies | Studies span 55.00% to 84.27%; page last updated 22 Sep 2025 |
| Dynamic Yield by Mastercard | 77.54% | First-party measurement of their own customer base — 200M+ monthly unique users | Trailing 12 months; read 28 Jul 2026 — re-renders monthly |
The cuts matter more than the headline. By device (Dynamic Yield, read 28 Jul 2026): mobile 79.92% · tablet 72.31% · desktop 69.19% — a ten-point mobile penalty. By industry: Beauty & Personal Care highest at 79.81%, Pet Care & Veterinary Services lowest at 51.1%. If your rate sits anywhere inside Baymard's 55–84% study range, you're not an outlier — you're a store.
For checkout abandonment there is no published benchmark at all. The nearest sourced anchor: Littledata's 2023 benchmark of 2,800 Shopify stores puts checkout completion at 45% (littledata.io, read 28 Jul 2026) — which implies 55% checkout abandonment. That 55% is our subtraction, not Littledata's published number. Same arithmetic by device: mobile 56%, desktop 51%.
Why carts are abandoned
Baymard's quantitative study of US online shoppers starts with the number no checkout change can fix: 42% abandoned a cart because "I was just browsing / not ready to buy." Excluding that segment, the reasons rank like this:
| Reason for abandoning | Share |
|---|---|
| Extra costs too high — shipping, tax, fees | 40% |
| Delivery was too slow | 20% |
| Didn't trust the site with card details | 19% |
| Site wanted an account | 18% |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% |
| Unsatisfactory returns policy | 13% |
| Couldn't see the total cost up front | 12% |
| Card was declined | 10% |
| Not enough payment methods | 9% |
| Don't know | 7% |
Source: Baymard Institute, page last updated 22 September 2025. Half the list — hidden costs, forced accounts, long forms, errors, invisible totals — is fixable in your checkout this quarter. The rest is pricing and policy.
What to do about it
Watch your own sessions first. The table above is the industry's reasons; yours are on tape. Mtrix reports a CartAbandonment event automatically when a session has a BeginCheckout event and no Purchase after it — note the boundary: that event fires at the checkout line, checkout abandonment in this page's terms, the highest-intent slice. Filter session replay to those sessions and watch what happened: the form field they gave up on, the rage clicks, the moment the shipping cost appeared.
Then fix the reasons you can. Extra costs lead the fixable list at 40% — if shipping is the killer, set your threshold deliberately: the free-shipping threshold calculator does that arithmetic. Show the total early; 12% left because they couldn't see it. Offer guest checkout; 18% left over an account. And shorten the form — Baymard measures the average US checkout at 23.48 form elements against an ideal of 12–14, with the rest of the checkout-design data in the conversion benchmarks guide. The stake, per Baymard: $260 billion of lost orders are recoverable through better checkout design, against $738 billion of combined US and EU ecommerce sales.
Then recover what the fix doesn't catch. Abandoned-cart recovery emails are built into the Mtrix email creator: sends trigger on events — the automatic CartAbandonment event included — audiences filter per email, and dynamic blocks compose at send time. What you won't get is a recovery-rate promise: nobody can source one. And one honest scope: the email creator is not a full ESP — if deliverability infrastructure is your buying criterion, buy a dedicated ESP.