Shopping Cart Abandonment

Top Causes of Shopping Cart Abandonment

With 2.77 billion consumers shopping online in 2024 alone, it’s clear there’s big money at stake in ecommerce retail. What you might not realize is that the average e-commerce store loses about 70%  of the value of those potential sales to cart abandonment. That’s a whopping $111-$136 billion in the United States alone each year.

It’s impossible for anyone to totally eliminate cart abandonment. But if you can understand where it’s coming from and what’s driving it, you can recover up to 63% of abandoned merchandise. Here are some helpful statistics to get you started.

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Cart Abandonment by Industry

Every industry has different purchase processes. Think about it: consumers probably put a bit more thought into buying a car than a bag of potatoes. So, it makes sense that cart abandonment can fluctuate wildly among sectors. As an ecommerce customer’s decision-making process becomes more complex and requires more research — like buying an engagement ring or a new couch — they likely feel the need to “shop around” before committing to a purchase. The result? Sectors like these inevitably experience higher abandonment rates.

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Source: Dynamic Yield

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Source: hotjart

The Effect of Browsing Device on Cart Abandonment

Even the device a customer is using can affect abandonment rates. Customers tend to use multiple devices to do research before making a purchase — spending time at lunch, for example, browsing for shoes on their cell phone but not making the purchase until they’re at home on their desktop and can more clearly see details like color and texture.

Another cause for cart abandonment can be a clunky app that isn’t optimized for mobile, leaving customers searching for a more seamless shopping experience with another vendor.

In general, the smaller the screen, the higher the abandonment rate.

Top Products Left in Carts

But nobody’s immune to cart abandonment. Even merchants selling products in lower-risk sectors that don’t require lots of comparison shopping can find themselves vulnerable. Cosmetics and furniture items tend to be especially prone to being left in a cart.

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Source: Statista

Top 13 Reasons for Cart Abandonment

While it’s important to know where shopping cart abandonment happens, it’s even more critical to know why it happens. In our original research, “State of Consumer Attitudes on Ecommerce, Fraud, & CX 2023-2024,” respondents reported that price, shipping and selection were significant factors influencing cart abandonment. Here are more of the reasons shoppers may lose interest in completing a purchase:

Even the most seasoned ecommerce retailers have trouble preventing shopping cart abandonment. After all, it’s a lot less awkward for shoppers to close a web page than put physical items back on a shelf. But here’s the good news: There are several steps merchants can take to reduce their cart abandonment rates.

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Source: Baymard Institute

How to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Ready to learn about how you can optimize your checkout process and take your ecommerce store to the next level? The team at ClearSale can help.

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Highlight sales and price reductions

Online consumers should feel like the value they can get is time-sensitive.

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Make choices obvious

Product options, such as colors, sizes and other variations should be easy to see and select.

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Simplify the checkout process

Focus on the least number of steps between product selection and purchase.

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Be transparent

All costs associated with a purchase should be clearly displayed upfront to avoid surprising customers with hidden fees. 

Ready to learn about how you can optimize your checkout process and take your ecommerce store to the next level? The team at ClearSale can help.

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