Cart Abandonment

Abandoned Cart · Basket Abandonment

Definition

Cart abandonment is an unfinished purchase: the shopper added products to the cart but never placed the order. The market average abandonment rate is around 70%.

Why carts get abandoned

70% of carts never turn into an order. The reasons split into structural and situational.

Structural — fixed by optimizing the checkout:
– An unexpected shipping cost, revealed only at the last step
– Mandatory registration before purchase
– A long form with fields nobody needs
– Too few payment options

Situational — handled through personalization:
– The shopper is putting the decision off — they need a reminder
– They are comparing prices — they need a reason to come back (a promo code, a guarantee)
– They got distracted — they need a trigger on the next visit

The metric: cart abandonment rate

Cart Abandonment Rate = 1 − (Completed orders / Add-to-carts)
Example: 1 − (200 / 1000) = 80%

Read it by device and by channel — mobile is typically 10–20 pp worse than desktop.

Recovery strategies

Tool	Audience	Best moment
Onsite pop-up	Every visitor, anonymous included	On the next visit, within 7 days
Exit-intent pop-up	Visitors leaving the cart page	As the cursor moves to close the tab
Email trigger	Signed-in shoppers with marketing consent	1 hour, 24 hours, 72 hours after abandonment
Push notification	Push subscribers	1–3 hours after
Remarketing	Cookied audience	The first 24–72 hours

Email, push and remarketing run in the channels the retailer already owns — an ESP, a mobile app,
an ad platform. Gravity Field covers the onsite rows of this table, and feeds personalized product
recommendations into the abandoned-cart emails your own ESP sends.

Tip: do not lead with a discount — try a plain reminder first. An instant discount teaches
shoppers to abandon the cart on purpose in order to collect a promo code.

Common mistakes

One scenario for everyone — a shopper with a $10 cart and a shopper with a $1,000 cart need
different offers
No deduplication — if the shopper did place the order in the end, reminders about the
“abandoned” cart keep arriving
An instant promo code — it devalues the brand and teaches people to postpone the purchase

Frequently asked questions

What cart abandonment rate counts as normal?

The market average is 70–75%, and the figure varies by category and by device. On mobile it runs higher — 85–90% — because entering data is harder. Fashion abandons more than electronics. Anything below 60% is an excellent result and usually points either to a simplified checkout or to an audience with unusually high purchase intent.

How long after abandonment should a trigger fire?

The first touch belongs within an hour of the abandonment — that is the peak of the return probability. The second comes after 24 hours, the third (carrying a personal promo code) after 72 hours. A series of three touches recovers up to 15% of abandoned carts, against 5–7% for a single touch.

How is onsite recovery different from an email trigger?

An email trigger works off-site and needs a signed-in shopper who has consented to marketing, and it is sent from the retailer's own ESP. Onsite recovery — a pop-up on the next visit — fires on the site itself, with no email address involved. That matters most for anonymous visitors, who cannot be reached by email at all.

Gravity Field