What is the difference between cart abandonment and checkout abandonment?

The starting point differs. Cart abandonment counts anyone who added an item and did not buy, even if they never opened checkout. Checkout abandonment counts only those who entered the payment flow, so it is always the smaller number and it points directly at shipping cost, payment options and the bank page.

What is a normal checkout abandonment rate?

No figure imported from external reports transfers here, because the rate depends on the product category and price, the payment options available, shipping cost, whether registration is required and the stability of the gateways. The valid baseline is the trend of this rate on the same site, compared across device, channel and payment method.

Checkout Abandonment

Intermediate

Updated Jul 11, 2026 Shahin editorial 3 min read

PronunciationEN/ˈtʃɛkaʊt əˈbændənmənt/

Checkout abandonment is when a user starts the checkout process but does not complete the order within the measurement window.

This metric is not cart abandonment and must not stand in for it: cart abandonment counts from the moment an item is added and is always the larger figure, while checkout abandonment starts at the checkout step and isolates friction in shipping, payment method and the bank page. The second distinction is payment failure; a declined or errored gateway transaction is a technical fault rather than a user decision, and merging the two reports a gateway outage as customer hesitation. On the Iranian web that distinction matters even more, because payment moves the user off the site to a bank page, and if the return from the gateway is not instrumented some successful purchases also appear abandoned. Finally, state the counting basis: a session-scoped and a user-scoped figure differ on identical data.

How it is calculated

Checkout abandonment rate = 1 minus the ratio of users who completed a purchase to users who started checkout

The denominator is the distinct users who fired the checkout-start event in the selected range, and the numerator is those same users if they also fired a successful purchase event inside the conversion window. The unit is a percentage. To keep the figure actionable, separate failed gateway transactions and report them as payment failures rather than abandonment.

FAQ

Sources:Amplitude glossary — Cart abandonment