The documented average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. That figure comes from the Baymard Institute, which averaged 50 separate studies published between 2006 and 2025. It has barely moved across two decades — which is the first clue about how to read it.
Two things that number hides, and both change what you should do about it. Your Shopify admin is not measuring the same thing. And a large share of those abandonments were never yours to win.
What is the average cart abandonment rate in 2026?
70.22%, averaged across 50 studies from 2006 to 2025. Roughly seven in ten shoppers who add something to a cart do not complete the purchase. The stability of the number over twenty years matters more than its size: this is a structural property of online retail, not a defect your store introduced.
That stability also means you should be suspicious of any source quoting a dramatically different figure for 2026. Aggregations land between about 70% and 75% depending on which studies they include and how they define a cart.
Your Shopify abandoned checkout rate is a different metric
This is the single most common mistake merchants make with this benchmark, and it goes the flattering direction — which is why nobody catches it.
Shopify only records an abandoned checkout after the shopper enters identifying information, usually an email address, and then leaves it incomplete for at least ten minutes. The 70.22% benchmark is measured from the moment something enters a cart.
| Cart abandonment (the 70% benchmark) | Shopify abandoned checkouts | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts counting at | Add to cart | Email entered at checkout |
| Requires contact details | No | Yes |
| Delay before it counts | None | 10 minutes |
| Who you can email | Nobody | Everybody in the report |
| Typical size | Large | Much smaller |
So if your Shopify admin suggests you are dramatically outperforming the benchmark, you are almost certainly comparing a later, narrower funnel stage against a wider one. Both numbers are useful. They are not comparable.
The practical consequence: the shoppers in Shopify’s report are recoverable by email, because you have their address. Everyone who bailed before that point can only be reached on-site — with cart urgency, a sticky add-to-cart bar, or an exit-intent offer.
Cart abandonment by device
Roughly 80% on mobile against 66–69% on desktop. This split comes from Dynamic Yield’s network data, echoed by Contentsquare and SaleCycle — not from Baymard, which publishes no device breakdown at all. A lot of articles attribute device figures to Baymard; they are wrong.
| Device | Reported range | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile | 79.9–80.5% | Dynamic Yield, Contentsquare, SaleCycle |
| Desktop | 66.4–69.2% | Dynamic Yield, Contentsquare, SaleCycle |
Sources disagree by a couple of points, so the durable finding is the gap of roughly 12 percentage points, not any particular decimal. Mobile shoppers abandon far more, and since mobile is the majority of traffic for most stores, your blended rate is largely a reflection of your traffic mix rather than your checkout quality.
That also means a store whose rate “worsens” year over year may simply be getting more mobile traffic. Segment by device before concluding anything went wrong.
The part of the 70% you cannot fix
Here is the context almost every statistics roundup drops. Baymard excludes a browsing segment — worth about 42% of all abandonments — from its list of abandonment reasons, because those shoppers were comparison shopping, saving items for later, or checking what delivery would cost, with no intention of buying in that session.
Adding to cart is a bookmarking gesture as often as it is a purchase gesture. No checkout optimisation reaches those people.
This reframes the goal. You are not trying to convert 70% of abandoners. You are working on the remainder, which is why credible improvements are measured in single-digit percentage points, and why any vendor promising to “cut abandonment by half” is describing something that has never happened.
Why the rest abandon, with numbers
Among shoppers who did have intent, Baymard’s reasons are ranked and specific. Respondents could choose more than one, so these do not total 100%.
| 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 required account creation | 18% |
| Checkout too long or complicated | 17% |
| Website errors or crashes | 17% |
| Unsatisfactory returns policy | 13% |
| Couldn’t see or calculate total cost upfront | 12% |
| Credit card declined | 10% |
| Not enough payment methods | 9% |
Read that list as a to-do list, because almost every line is a decision someone made rather than a customer behaviour. Extra costs, forced accounts, a long checkout, hidden totals — those are configuration, not fate. The top two alone are about cost transparency and delivery expectations, which are set long before checkout.
What actually moves the number at the cart stage
Ordered by how much of the list above they touch:
- Show the full cost early. The single biggest reason, at 40%, is extra costs appearing late. A shipping estimate or a free-shipping progress bar on the cart page pre-empts the shock.
- Remove the account wall. Guest checkout addresses an 18% objection with one setting.
- Shorten the checkout. Every removed field helps the 17% who leave because it is too long.
- Add deadline pressure honestly. A cart timer converts “I’ll come back later” into a decision now — as long as it describes a cart that expires rather than stock you are not really holding.
- Fix mobile first. With a 12-point device gap, the same fix is worth more on a small screen.
For where your overall conversion rate should sit once abandonment is under control, see our Shopify conversion rate benchmarks by niche.
How to calculate a number you can actually compare
Cart abandonment rate = (1 − completed purchases ÷ carts created) × 100Use carts created, not sessions and not checkouts started, or you will not be comparing against 70.22%. Then segment by device, because a blended figure hides the only split that reliably matters.
Track the trend, not the absolute. Your traffic mix, your channel mix and your product price all push the absolute number around for reasons that have nothing to do with how good your checkout is.
Bottom line
70.22% is the right benchmark, from 50 studies over twenty years. Just do not read it as a scoreboard. About 42% of those abandonments were browsing, your Shopify report is measuring a different and later stage, and the mobile-desktop gap explains more variance than most store-level differences do.
The useful version of this number is narrow: segment by device, compare against your own past, and work down Baymard’s reasons list from the top, because the first line item is worth double the second.