Definition
Email cart abandonment rate measures the percentage of online shopping carts that are started but not completed — the shopper adds items to the cart and leaves without purchasing. While cart abandonment itself is a checkout metric, it is closely tied to email because abandoned cart emails are the primary tool for recovering those lost sales.
The rate reveals how much potential revenue leaks at the final step. A high abandonment rate is not necessarily a failure; it often reflects comparison shopping or a moment of hesitation, both of which email can address.
How It Works
Cart abandonment rate is calculated by dividing the number of carts abandoned by the number of carts created, then multiplying by 100. A cart is considered abandoned when a shopper adds items and leaves without completing a purchase within a defined window.
- Carts created count sessions where at least one item was added.
- Carts completed count those that ended in a purchase.
- Abandoned carts are the difference between the two.
Email addresses the gap by reminding shoppers what they left behind and giving them a reason to return. The recovery campaign's effectiveness is measured separately, often as a share of abandoned carts that convert after the reminder.
Why It Matters
Cart abandonment represents revenue that was nearly won. Shoppers who reached the cart had already expressed strong purchase intent, so recovering even a fraction of them is highly profitable compared to acquiring new visitors.
Tracking the abandonment rate alongside the recovery rate shows the true state of the funnel. A high abandonment rate with a strong recovery email programme is far less damaging than the same rate with no recovery effort at all.
Best Practices
- Trigger the first abandoned cart email within a few hours, while intent is still fresh.
- Show the exact items left behind and a clear path back to checkout.
- Use a short sequence rather than a single email, escalating from a reminder to an incentive.
- Investigate checkout friction that causes abandonment in the first place.
Example
An online store sees 20,000 carts created in a week and 15,000 of them abandoned, giving a cart abandonment rate of 75 percent. Its abandoned cart email sequence recovers 1,500 of those carts — a 10 percent recovery rate — turning a large leak into a meaningful revenue stream.
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Related Glossary Terms
A/B Testing
A/B testing in email marketing is the practice of sending two variations of an email to a small sample of your list to determine which version performs better before sending the winner to the remaining subscribers.
Abandoned Cart Email
An abandoned cart email is an automated message sent to customers who added items to their online shopping cart but left without completing the purchase. It is one of the highest-converting email types in ecommerce.
Abuse Complaint
An abuse complaint is a report from a recipient who marks an email as spam, which negatively affects sender reputation and deliverability.
AI Email Summary
An AI email summary is a short, machine-generated overview of an email's key points, shown by Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail before a recipient opens the message. It is reshaping how email marketers think about subject lines, preview text and open rates.
AI Inbox Summary
An AI inbox summary is an AI-generated digest that condenses unread email — often highlighting news, actions and senders — changing how clearly your marketing email reaches and engages subscribers.
AI Inbox
An AI inbox is an email client that uses artificial intelligence to summarise, sort, prioritise and sometimes answer emails before the human recipient reads them. It is transforming email marketing metrics and copywriting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cart abandonment is commonly high, often in the range of 70 to 80 percent across ecommerce, though the exact figure varies by industry and device. The trend matters more than any single number.
Abandoned cart emails remind shoppers of the items they left and make it easy to return and complete the purchase, recovering a portion of the carts that would otherwise be lost.
Recovery rates vary, but even a single-digit percentage recovery represents substantial revenue, because the shoppers were already close to buying.
Yes. Mobile carts are often abandoned at a higher rate due to checkout friction, so measuring by device can reveal a fixable mobile-specific problem.