Shopping Carts Abandoned

What is Shopping Carts Abandoned?

Shopping Carts Abandoned counts the number of online shoppers who add items to their cart but leave without completing the purchase.

Every abandoned cart is a decision that almost went your way. Tracking this metric tells you how often that happens and, more importantly, where in the checkout experience shoppers are walking away. For any eCommerce business, it's one of the clearest signals of lost revenue sitting within reach.

Who uses this KPI?

Online Sales Managers and Store Owners use Shopping Carts Abandoned as a core performance indicator. It's equally relevant to any founder or leader accountable for eCommerce revenue who wants to know whether checkout friction is costing them sales.

How is Shopping Carts Abandoned calculated?

The formula is straightforward:

Number of shopping carts abandoned

This is a raw count, not a rate. You're measuring the volume of carts that were created but never converted to an order within a given period.

What is a good target for this KPI?

The ideal target is zero, though that's aspirational. A more practical goal is consistent reduction over time. If your number is rising month over month, something in your checkout experience is pushing people away. If it's falling, your changes are working.

Pair this metric with Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate to understand the proportion of carts lost relative to total carts created. The rate adds context that the raw count alone can't give you.

What causes high cart abandonment?

A rising Shopping Carts Abandoned count usually points to friction in the purchase path. Common causes include:

• Unexpected costs: Shipping fees or taxes that appear late in checkout
• Forced account creation: Requiring registration before purchase
• Slow or confusing checkout: Too many steps, unclear fields, or poor mobile experience
• Payment trust issues: Missing security signals or limited payment options
• Comparison shopping: Shoppers saving items to browse elsewhere

Knowing the count tells you the problem exists. Reviewing session recordings, exit surveys, and funnel drop-off data tells you where to fix it.

How often should this KPI be monitored?

Monthly monitoring gives you a reliable view of trends and lets you measure the impact of any changes you make to your site. If you're actively running checkout experiments or recovery campaigns, weekly tracking gives you faster feedback.

What are some variations of this KPI?

Total Carts Abandoned is used interchangeably with Shopping Carts Abandoned and refers to the same raw count.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate is the most closely related KPI and is often more useful for benchmarking. It expresses abandoned carts as a percentage of total carts created, so you can compare performance across different traffic volumes or time periods.

How to track Shopping Carts Abandoned with Klipfolio

Klipfolio connects directly to your eCommerce platforms and pulls Shopping Carts Abandoned data automatically, so you're not waiting on a report or pasting numbers together from different sources. You can monitor the count alongside Abandonment Rate, conversion metrics, and revenue in a single dashboard, updated on a schedule that matches how you work.

When the number moves, you'll know without having to go looking.