Cart Benchmarks
Cart abandonment and average-cart-value benchmarks by vertical, with guidance on when a 75% drop-off is category-typical and when it signals a fixable problem.
Cart Benchmarks
Reference ranges for cart abandonment rate and average cart value across e-commerce verticals, used to judge whether your store's numbers are normal or off-pace.
Cart benchmarks are the typical ranges for two paired metrics — cart abandonment rate (sessions that add to cart but don't complete checkout) and average cart value (the mean basket size at the add-to-cart stage) — segmented by vertical, device, and order-value tier. They exist because a single industry-wide number is misleading: a 75% abandonment rate is roughly typical in fashion but alarming in groceries, and a €45 cart in beauty means something different than a €450 cart in furniture.
They are the diagnostic baseline for cart optimization work. Without a vertical-specific reference, you can't tell whether a fix is overdue or whether you're already at the category ceiling and should redirect effort upstream.
The headline number repeated across the industry — roughly 70% cart abandonment — is an unweighted average that hides everything useful. Fashion and luxury sit well above it because browsing-as-shopping is a category norm. Groceries and pet consumables sit well below because the purchase is planned and the basket is rebuilt weekly.
Use the tables below as a comparison floor and ceiling for your own store. If your numbers sit inside the band, the lever isn't the cart — it's traffic quality, product page conversion, or post-purchase. If you're 8-12 points worse than the band, the cart is the bottleneck.
Cart abandonment rate by vertical (desktop + mobile blended)
| Vertical | Typical range | Median | Best-in-class |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fashion & apparel | 72-82% | 77% | 65% |
| Beauty & personal care | 65-75% | 70% | 58% |
| Consumer electronics | 78-85% | 81% | 70% |
| Home & furniture | 80-88% | 84% | 73% |
| Food & groceries | 45-58% | 52% | 38% |
| Pet supplies | 55-65% | 60% | 47% |
| Health & supplements | 60-70% | 65% | 53% |
| Jewellery & luxury | 82-90% | 86% | 75% |
Mobile abandonment runs 6-10 points higher than desktop in every vertical except groceries (where the gap closes because the basket is utility-driven). If you blend devices in one number, you'll under-invest in mobile checkout — which is now 65-75% of sessions on most Shopify stores.
Median cart abandonment rate by vertical
How to read the numbers
Abandonment isn't a single failure mode — it's a stack. Roughly half of cart adds are research behaviour (price-checking, wishlist proxy, shipping-cost discovery), a quarter are decision hesitation, and a quarter are checkout friction. Only the last quarter is actually fixable by changing the cart and checkout.
That's why the best-in-class column matters more than the median. Top-quartile stores in fashion aren't running at 50% abandonment — they're running at 65%, because the research half is structural. Setting an internal target lower than the best-in-class column is how teams burn quarters chasing impossible deltas.
Average cart value (ACV) at add-to-cart, by vertical
| Vertical | Median ACV | Mobile ACV | Desktop ACV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fashion & apparel | €95 | €82 | €118 |
| Beauty & personal care | €55 | €48 | €68 |
| Consumer electronics | €220 | €185 | €275 |
| Home & furniture | €340 | €280 | €445 |
| Food & groceries | €72 | €68 | €78 |
| Pet supplies | €48 | €44 | €58 |
| Health & supplements | €65 | €60 | €78 |
| Jewellery & luxury | €385 | €310 | €520 |
The 75% trap
If your store sits at 75% abandonment, the right next question is which vertical you're benchmarking against — not what to fix. For a fashion store that's median performance and the lever is elsewhere; for a grocery store it's a five-alarm fire and the cart is broken. Compare to the right row before you brief the dev team.
Diagnosing your own cart against the benchmark
Pull 60-90 days of GA4 data and split abandonment by device, by traffic source (paid social skews higher; branded search skews lower), and by new vs returning. The aggregate number is meaningless — a paid-social-heavy beauty store at 72% looks worse than the median until you separate out the 80% paid-social slice from the 55% returning-customer slice.
Once you've segmented, focus cart optimization work on the slice that's furthest from its own benchmark band — not the slice with the highest absolute abandonment. A returning-customer cohort at 65% in fashion is the real anomaly worth a test, even though new-paid-social at 82% looks scarier on the dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
It depends entirely on your vertical. For fashion, beauty, and electronics it's roughly median. For groceries or pet consumables it's 15-20 points worse than typical and signals real checkout friction. Always compare to your category row before judging.
Mobile carts capture more browsing behaviour, more interrupted sessions, and more friction at checkout (smaller forms, harder coupon entry, slower autofill). A 6-10 point gap is normal; a gap larger than 12 points usually points to a fixable mobile checkout issue.
Cart abandonment rate = 1 − (completed purchases ÷ carts created), measured at session or user level. GA4 and Shopify use slightly different denominators — Shopify counts unique checkouts initiated, GA4 counts add_to_cart events — so the two will not match exactly.
Cart abandonment includes everyone who added to cart but didn't buy. Checkout abandonment is narrower — only sessions that started the checkout flow and didn't complete. Checkout abandonment is usually 20-30 points lower than cart abandonment and is the more actionable of the two.
No. Average cart value (ACV) is measured at add-to-cart, before discounts, shipping, and abandonment. Average order value (AOV) is measured at completed purchase. AOV is typically 10-20% lower than ACV because discounts apply and high-ACV carts abandon at higher rates.
Quarterly is enough for most stores. Benchmarks shift slowly, but your traffic mix doesn't — a single big paid-social push or a Klaviyo flow change can move your blended abandonment 5+ points in a month, so re-segment whenever the traffic mix changes materially.
Most likely traffic-mix, not site quality. Best-in-class stores skew heavily to branded search and returning customers; if your paid social share is above 40%, expect to sit 5-8 points above the best-in-class line even with a perfect cart.
Match the best-in-class column for your vertical, then redirect effort upstream. Beyond best-in-class, marginal gains on cart cost more than the same effort spent on product page conversion or post-purchase LTV.
Three reasons: planned baskets (the customer arrived intending to buy), high repeat frequency (the friction was already absorbed on visit one), and saved payment methods. Apply those mechanics — saved carts, one-tap reorder, default payment — to lift any vertical.
Yes, materially. Stores with a clearly communicated free-shipping threshold typically see 4-7 points lower abandonment than the vertical median, because the biggest single cause of abandonment — surprise shipping cost — is removed from the cart page itself.
Get an AI expert review of your site
Paste your URL — Metricuno's AI runs the same heuristic checks a senior CRO consultant would, scoring your page and prioritising the fixes that'll move conversion fastest.