In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Also known as "shopping cart abandonment". Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is quite common. Marketers can count how many of the shopping carts used in a specified period result in completed sales versus how many are abandoned. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or to the number of completed transactions. The typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91%.
Contents
Causes
There are various reasons behind the high cart abandonment rate.
Purpose
Abandonment rate as a marketing metric which helps marketers to understand website user behavior. Specifically, abandonment rate is defined as "the percentage of shopping carts that are abandoned" prior to the completion of the purchase. This information is generally not used on a facility reservation report.
Construction
As an example, an online comics retailer found that of the 25,000 customers who loaded items into their electronic baskets, only 5,000 actually purchased: