Cart abandonment
When a shopper adds items to their online cart but leaves without completing the purchase.
Definition
Definition
Think about what happens in a physical supermarket: a customer walks the aisles, fills their trolley, and then, just before reaching the checkout, leaves it in the middle of an aisle and walks out. Online stores face exactly the same situation, except it happens far more often.
Cart abandonment occurs when a user adds one or more products to their cart but does not complete the transaction. Technically, the event is recorded the moment a cart with items exists but no associated order is generated. Not all abandonment is the same, and the distinction matters because each type requires a different response:
- Browse abandonment: the shopper views products but never adds anything to the cart.
- Cart abandonment: the shopper adds products but does not begin checkout.
- Checkout abandonment: the shopper starts the payment process but does not complete it.
The cart abandonment rate is the KPI that measures this:
Abandonment rate = (1 − completed orders / carts created) × 100
According to the Baymard Institute, the global average sits at around 70.19%, meaning that for every ten shoppers showing active purchase intent, seven leave without buying. The most documented causes: unexpected costs at the end of the process, particularly shipping fees that only appear at the final step (47%); a long or complicated checkout (22%); being forced to create an account before purchasing (25%); slow delivery times (24%); and lack of trust in site security.
What it's used for
What it's used for
Every abandoned cart is a sale that almost closed. Baymard estimates that in the US and EU alone, roughly €260 billion in lost orders could be recovered through better checkout design.
To put that in concrete terms: a store with 125,000 monthly visits and an average order value of €100 that improves its conversion rate by just 0.5 percentage points adds €62,500 in monthly revenue.
The most effective levers for reducing abandonment are simplifying checkout (fewer fields, fewer steps), showing all costs upfront, offering guest checkout, and diversifying payment methods. For recovering abandonment after it happens, the go-to strategies are automated cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and push notifications.
Doofinder
Doofinder acts upstream of abandonment, at the product discovery stage. A site search that returns irrelevant results, or a poor browsing experience, means shoppers never add the right product to their cart in the first place, or add something they later remove. By improving search relevance, autocomplete, and product recommendations, Doofinder helps carts fill with products shoppers actually want, reducing abandonment driven by product dissatisfaction.
Example
Case study
An electronics retailer identifies a cart abandonment rate of 78%. Digging into the data, it finds that 35% of abandonments happen at the exact moment shipping costs appear in the final checkout step. Two changes are made: estimated shipping costs are shown on the product page itself, and the checkout is cut from five steps to three. Within two months the rate drops to 68%, which at their traffic volume translates to hundreds of recovered orders per month.
References