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Cart abandonment is a shopper adding one or more items to a cart and then leaving without completing the purchase. The abandonment rate is those unfinished carts divided by carts created. In A/B testing, it helps teams explain which part of the visitor experience changed and why that change could affect conversion behavior.
Cart abandonment is a shopper adding one or more items to a cart and then leaving without completing the purchase. The abandonment rate is those unfinished carts divided by carts created. It is not the share of all sessions that fail to buy.
The cart is the signal that the shopper started a purchase. Abandonment is the purchase not finishing in that session, or by whatever window you define. Shipping cost revealed late, a long form, a failed payment, and too many similar products are different reasons. They all produce the same metric. A test has to name the reason. The comparison-fatigue post is about one reason. Checkout friction is about another. Do not treat this definition as a list of fixes.
These shoppers already did the hard part of choosing a product. Losing them is a different problem from never getting the add-to-cart. Teams that only watch the sitewide conversion rate bury that difference. The cart rate tells you the leak is after intent. It does not tell you which element to change. That comes from the cause you hypothesized.
In a week, 1,000 carts are created and 700 do not become orders. The abandonment rate is 70% if "does not become an order" matches the window you wrote down. If 200 of those 700 come back the next day and buy, a same-session definition and a seven-day definition disagree. Publish the window with the rate. If the hypothesis is "too many similar products," read the comparison-fatigue post before you redesign the cart.
Define when a cart counts and when it is abandoned, and keep that pair stable. Segment by device and by whether shipping was shown. Then pick a cause and use the matching page: comparison fatigue or checkout friction . Do not run a test whose only goal is "lower the rate" with five unrelated edits.
A common mistake is dividing abandoned carts by all sessions. That is not an abandonment rate. Another is emailing every abandoned cart as if the shopper was lost, including people who bought an hour later on the same account. The definition has to say whether a later purchase still counts as abandoned.
Comparison fatigue and cart abandonment: One specific cause, and what to test. This entry only defines abandonment.
No. A bounce is a session that leaves without a defined next step, often from a landing page. Cart abandonment requires a cart. Someone who never adds an item cannot abandon one. Mixing the two rates makes the checkout look worse, or better, than it is.
This page does not publish one. The rate depends on what you count as a cart, whether you include buyers who return later, and the category. Use your own denominator consistently. A definition that quotes a universal percentage goes stale the moment the denominator changes.
Comparison fatigue has its own post. Checkout friction has its own post. Start there when you already know which part of the path you want to test. Stay here only if you need the meaning of the metric.
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