Cart Abandonment Statistics: All Published Numbers, One Table

Cart abandonment is the most quoted and worst cited number in ecommerce. Half the articles on the internet say “roughly 70%” and link to each other in a circle. The actual primary source is Baymard Institute’s registry, which collects every published study it can verify, currently 50 of them spanning 2006 to 2025, and computes the average: 70.22%. This entry puts the entire registry in one sortable table, then adds what the abandonment is made of, because the composition is where the money is.

All 50 published studies, one table

Click a header to sort. Every row is a separate published measurement, as catalogued by Baymard with its retrieval date.

Source for the full registry: Baymard Institute, last updated September 22, 2025, read July 2026.

The drift the table hides

Sort by data year and a pattern appears that a single average cannot show. The early studies, 2006 through 2012, mostly live between the high 50s and low 70s. The recent studies, 2017 onward, mostly live in the mid 70s and above, with SaleCycle measuring 84.27% during the pandemic year and 79.53% in 2023.

The usual explanation, and I find it convincing, is the device shift. Mobile now carries roughly three quarters of ecommerce traffic in Dynamic Yield’s panel, and phones are where people browse on the couch, park items as bookmarks, and get interrupted. More window shopping per session means more abandoned carts, with nothing broken.

Vertical spread does the rest. In the same Dynamic Yield data through June 2026, Beauty and Personal Care carts were abandoned at 79.81% over the trailing year while Pet Care sat at 51.1%. If your benchmark did not come from your vertical, it is barely a benchmark.

What the 70% is made of

The registry answers “how much”, but the useful question is “why”. Baymard’s survey of US shoppers found 43% abandon because they were just browsing and not ready to buy. That part is weather. Among the rest, the ranked reasons are: extra costs too high, 39%. Delivery too slow, 21%. Did not trust the site with card details, 19%. Forced account creation, 19%. Checkout too long or complicated, 18%. Unsatisfactory returns policy, 15%. Site errors, 15%. Could not see the total cost up front, 14%. Not enough payment methods, 10%. Card declined, 8%.

Two thirds of your abandonment is weather. The last third is a hole in the roof, and it has a published list of coordinates.

Baymard prices the fixable part precisely: solvable checkout usability issues are worth an average 35.26% conversion lift for large sites, or about 260 billion dollars in recoverable orders across the US and EU. I walked through how I hunt those exact leaks in my checkout audit sequence, and the distinction between a parked cart and an interrupted checkout, which matter differently, lives in abandoned checkout vs abandoned cart.

How to use this page

When you need one number for a slide: 70.22%, Baymard average, cite the registry. When you need a benchmark for your store: filter the table to studies from the last five years, then adjust your expectation up if you are mobile-heavy or in beauty, down if you sell pet food on subscription. And when someone quotes you “cart abandonment is 88%” from a vendor landing page, you now have fifty receipts saying otherwise.