Average cart abandonment rate, 2026: the real numbers by device and reason

If you Google “average cart abandonment rate,” you’ll see numbers between 60% and 85% depending on the page. The honest, best-sourced answer is 70.22% — the Baymard Institute’s figure, averaged across 50 separate studies published between 2006 and 2025.(source) Roughly seven in ten people who add something to a cart leave without buying.

That number has barely moved in nearly two decades. So before you panic about your own rate, internalize the first uncomfortable truth: a high cart abandonment rate is normal. The question isn’t “how do I get to zero” — it’s “how much of my abandonment is the fixable kind, and where is it leaking.”

Here’s the short version, with sources:

• Global average cart abandonment: 70.22% (Baymard, 50 studies, 2006–2025).(source)
• By device: mobile ~85.7%, tablet ~80.7%, desktop ~73.1% (Barilliance).(source)
• Top fixable reason: extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) too high — 39% of non-browsing abandonments (Baymard).(source)
• Recoverable through better checkout UX: ~35% conversion lift, ~$260B in US+EU orders (Baymard).(source)

The rest of this post breaks it down with the receipts attached.

What “cart abandonment rate” actually measures

Cart abandonment rate is the share of shopping carts that get created but never converted into a completed order. The standard formula:

Cart abandonment rate = 1 − (completed purchases ÷ carts created)

Two things trip people up.

“Cart” and “checkout” abandonment are different stages. A cart abandonment counts anyone who added an item and didn’t buy. A checkout abandonment counts only people who actually started checkout — entered an email, hit the payment step — and bailed. Checkout abandonment is always the lower, scarier-in-a-good-way number, because those shoppers had real purchase intent. When a benchmark says “70%,” it’s almost always cart abandonment. Baymard’s 70.22% is the cart-level figure.(source)

Abandonment rate and conversion rate are two sides of the same coin, but not the same coin. Conversion rate is orders ÷ sessions; abandonment rate is non-purchases ÷ carts. A store can have a perfectly normal conversion rate and a terrifying-looking abandonment rate at the same time, because most sessions never create a cart at all. If you want the conversion-rate companion to this post, we wrote the average ecommerce conversion rate breakdown by industry — same sourcing discipline, different denominator.

The headline number, explained

The most defensible single figure in 2026 is Baymard’s 70.22%, and it’s defensible precisely because of how it’s built: an average of 50 independent studies spanning 2006 to 2025, rather than one vendor’s client base in one quarter.(source)

Note that Shopify, in its own enterprise guide, cites the same Baymard number (70.19%) rather than publishing a separate Shopify-specific figure.(source) That’s worth knowing: there isn’t a credible “Shopify stores abandon at X%” benchmark that diverges from the cross-industry ~70%. Anyone quoting a precise Shopify-only abandonment number is usually reselling Baymard with extra steps.

So the honest answer for “average cart abandonment rate in 2026” is ~70%, and your store being somewhere in the high 60s to high 70s is completely normal.

Cart abandonment rate by device

The mobile-versus-desktop gap is the most consistent finding in cart-abandonment data, mirroring what we see in conversion rate. Mobile abandons more. Always has.

Barilliance’s device breakdown:(source)

Two caveats so you don’t over-read this table:

• This specific device split is older data (Barilliance’s widely-cited 2015 dataset), and Barilliance’s own more recent figures show the gap narrowing slightly — mobile around 80.8%, desktop around 73.9%.(source) The direction is rock-solid across every source and every year; the exact decimals drift. Use it as “mobile abandons ~10–13 points more than desktop,” not as a number to quote to two decimal places.
• Mobile is also where most of your traffic and orders now live. Smartphones drive roughly 78% of retail site visits and about 70% of online orders.(source) So a higher mobile abandonment rate applied to the majority of your traffic means mobile is, for most stores, the single largest pool of recoverable revenue.

The strategic read is the same as for conversion rate: if mobile is 70%+ of your traffic and abandoning 10+ points harder than desktop, fixing mobile checkout friction is the highest-leverage project most stores can run. We went deep on the specific friction points in why Shopify carts get abandoned on mobile.

Why shoppers abandon: the reasons, ranked

This is the most useful table in the whole post, because it tells you what to fix. Baymard asked US online shoppers why they abandoned during checkout. Excluding the people who were “just browsing,” here’s the ranked breakdown:(source)

(Percentages sum to more than 100% because respondents could select multiple reasons.)

Before you act on this, the single most important caveat: 43% of US shoppers abandon simply because they were browsing, comparing prices, or saving items for later.(source) That share is essentially unrecoverable through checkout changes — those people never intended to buy on that visit. The reasons table above is the other bucket: people who wanted to buy and hit a wall.

A few things jump out of the ranked reasons:

• Surprise costs are the #1 killer, by a mile. 39% bail because the total at checkout was higher than they expected. The fix isn’t usually “charge less” — it’s “stop surprising people.” Show shipping and fees earlier, offer a free-shipping threshold, or fold shipping into the price. The damage is done the moment the number jumps at the final step.
• Forced account creation (19%) is pure self-inflicted friction. Guest checkout solves it. If you’re requiring an account before purchase, you are knowingly choosing to lose roughly one in five motivated buyers.
• Trust (19%) and checkout complexity (18%) are design problems, not pricing problems. Security badges, recognizable payment logos, fewer form fields, and a visible progress indicator all move this. Baymard’s broader research is built on benchmarking 326 top-grossing US and EU sites across 25 rounds of usability testing with 4,400+ participant sessions — this isn’t a survey-of-the-week.(source)

The reason this table matters more than the headline rate: you can’t fix “70%,” but you can fix “39% of my abandoners are surprised by shipping costs.” That’s an actionable problem with a known solution.

How much of cart abandonment is actually recoverable

Here’s where most cart-abandonment content goes off the rails. You’ll see headlines claiming ecommerce “loses trillions” to abandoned carts. That math takes the full value of every abandoned cart and treats it as recoverable revenue — which is nonsense, because ~43% of those carts were never going to convert.(source)

The credible number comes from Baymard: addressing documented checkout usability problems can lift conversion on the average large-scale ecommerce site by ~35.26%, which across the combined ~$738 billion in US+EU ecommerce sales translates to roughly $260 billion in orders recoverable solely through better checkout flow and design.(source) Shopify cites the same $260 billion figure in its enterprise checkout guide.(source)

The distinction that matters: that figure is recoverable through UX, not “all abandoned carts.” You are not getting back the browsers, the comparison shoppers, or the people who got distracted. You’re getting back the people who wanted to buy and hit avoidable friction. That’s still an enormous pool — a 35% conversion lift on a store doing $1M is $350K — but it’s a realistic pool, not a fantasy one.

Two levers to recover the recoverable

There are really only two places to work the cart-abandonment problem, and most stores under-invest in the first one.

1. Prevent the abandonment (the bigger lever). Reduce the friction that’s causing it in the first place. This is where the Baymard reasons table earns its keep: kill surprise costs, allow guest checkout, simplify the form, add the payment methods your market expects. Prevention compounds — every shopper benefits, forever, with no per-message cost. The catch is that Shopify Analytics will tell you where people drop but not why. Watching ten or fifteen session replays of shoppers who abandoned at your worst checkout step surfaces the actual reason fast — a rage click on an unresponsive “apply code” button, a dead click on something that only looks tappable, a shipping number that visibly makes them flinch and close the tab. Benchmarks tell you the average; replays tell you your store’s specific leak.

2. Recover the abandonment after the fact (the smaller, still-worthwhile lever). Abandoned-cart email and SMS flows bring back a slice of people who left with intent. Klaviyo’s benchmark report — built on 143,000+ abandoned-cart flows sent in 2023 — puts the average abandoned-cart flow at a 3.33% placed-order rate, $3.65 revenue per recipient, 50.5% open rate, and 6.25% click rate, with the top 10% of flows hitting a 7.69% placed-order rate.(source) Recovery is real money, but notice the ceiling: even great flows convert single-digit percentages of abandoners. That’s why prevention beats recovery — you want fewer people in the recovery funnel in the first place.

A useful way to find out why shoppers are bailing, straight from the source: ask them. An on-site survey triggered on the cart or a key product page (“What almost stopped you from buying today?”) gets you qualitative reasons that no benchmark can — and the responses point you straight at which row of the Baymard reasons table is actually hurting your store.

Limits of cart-abandonment benchmarks — read before you panic

Three honest caveats before you compare yourself to any number above:

Your traffic mix sets your baseline, not the industry average. A store running cold paid-social to a low-intent audience will abandon harder than a store living on email and returning customers — same product, different number. The 43%-are-just-browsing finding scales with how much top-of-funnel, low-intent traffic you buy. If your abandonment looks high and you’re 80% paid social, that’s expected, not broken.

Device mix moves your blended rate. A store that’s 85% mobile will post a higher blended abandonment rate than a 50/50 store, purely from mix — before any checkout problem enters the picture. Always segment by device before you draw conclusions. A scary 80% blended rate might be a perfectly normal 73% desktop and 86% mobile averaging out.(source)

The device decimals are dated; the direction isn’t. The exact per-device percentages in this post come from a widely-cited but older Barilliance dataset. Mobile-abandons-more-than-desktop is true in every dataset, every year. The specific figures drift. Treat them as direction, not destination.

How to know if you should actually be worried

A no-nonsense self-assessment, calibrated to the data above:

• Blended cart abandonment in the high 60s to high 70s: Normal. You’re at or near the global ~70% average. Work on prevention at the margins, but don’t treat this as an emergency.
• 80%+ blended: Likely a specific, fixable problem. Check the usual suspects in order — surprise shipping costs at checkout (the 39% reason), a forced-account-creation wall (19%), a broken or clunky mobile checkout step, or missing local payment methods. One of those is usually eating most of the gap.
• Mobile abandonment 15+ points above desktop: Your mobile checkout has friction desktop doesn’t. This is the most common and most recoverable pattern. Watch mobile session replays of the checkout flow first.
• Below ~65% sustained: Strong. You’ve got low-friction checkout and decent traffic intent. The lever now shifts to AOV and retention, not abandonment.

The fastest way to figure out which bucket you’re in and what’s actually causing it is to combine analytics (tells you where shoppers drop) with session replay (tells you why) and an on-site survey (tells you why, in their words). Watching twenty replays of shoppers who abandoned at your worst funnel step will teach you more about your store’s specific problem than any benchmark blog post — including this one.

What to do with all these numbers

The honest takeaway from a stats post is rarely “here’s the number to chase.” For cart abandonment it’s three things:

1. Recalibrate. ~70% is normal. If you’ve been treating your 72% as a crisis, stop. Spend that energy on the part you can move.
2. Find your fixable share. Roughly 43% of abandonment is browsing intent you can’t recover. The rest maps to the Baymard reasons table — surprise costs, forced accounts, trust, checkout length. Figure out which row is your problem.
3. Prevent before you recover. Fix the friction so fewer people abandon, then run recovery flows to claw back a slice of the ones who still do. In that order.

Most stores benefit more from killing one obvious checkout-friction point in their own funnel than from obsessing over how they stack up against an industry average built from 50 studies that don’t exactly match their traffic anyway. Find your leak. Watch the replays. Fix the leak.

Trying to figure out where your checkout actually leaks? Propel Replays is the session-replay tool we make for Shopify. Watch real shoppers hit the friction that’s costing you orders — free up to 750 pageviews per month, 30-day retention on every plan, and 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals (Lighthouse-measured). Built on Shopify primitives, so you can filter recordings by every customer field Shopify knows about. Install in under 30 seconds.

Sources

• Baymard Institute — 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics (average 70.22%, reasons breakdown, $260B recoverable)
• Baymard Institute — Checkout Usability research (326 sites, 4,400+ test sessions, ~35% conversion uplift)
• Barilliance — Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics (by device)
• Shopify — How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment (citing Baymard 70.19% and $260B recoverable)
• Klaviyo — Abandoned Cart Email Benchmarks (143,000+ flows, 2023)
• Shopify — Ecommerce Conversion Rate guide (device traffic/order share, citing Statista Q3 2025)