Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics 2026: Rates, Reasons and Canadian Data

Shopping cart abandonment statistics answer a question every online store owner asks sooner or later: how many shoppers add products to the cart and then leave without paying, and why? The short answer for 2026 is about seven in ten. This page gathers the cart and checkout figures that hold up, from the documented average abandonment rate to the specific reasons shoppers give, the cost of a long checkout, the effect of site speed and the Canadian ecommerce numbers behind them. Each figure names its original publisher and the year it was measured, and the publishers are listed again at the end so you can check the newest edition yourself.

Key shopping cart abandonment statistics at a glance

What is the average cart abandonment rate in 2026?

Baymard Institute, a usability research firm that has studied ecommerce checkouts for more than a decade, keeps a running list of published cart abandonment studies and averages them. Its current figure is 70.22%, calculated from 50 different studies of ecommerce shopping cart abandonment. Put plainly, for every ten shoppers who put something in a cart, about seven leave without completing the order.

The individual studies on Baymard’s list vary a lot. The lowest figures sit in the mid 50% range and the highest above 80%, because each study measures a different mix of stores, devices, countries and years. The newest entry on the list, from 2025, reports 71.72%. That spread is the first lesson of cart abandonment statistics: a single number is a benchmark, not a target. A furniture store with high order values and long research cycles will see more abandonment than a pharmacy where people reorder the same item every month.

For a Canadian store, the useful comparison is your own rate over time. Most ecommerce platforms report how many sessions created a cart and how many of those carts became orders. Divide abandoned carts by carts created and track the result monthly. If your rate sits near 70%, you are close to the documented average. If it sits well above 80%, the checkout itself is probably costing you sales.

Why shoppers abandon their carts

Not every abandoned cart is a lost sale. Many people use the cart as a wish list, a price calculator or a way to compare stores. Baymard’s quantitative study found that 42% of US online shoppers had abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing” or not ready to buy. Those visits are mostly unavoidable.

The reasons that remain are the ones a store can work on. When Baymard set the browsing group aside, it found this distribution of reasons among US shoppers who had abandoned an order:

• 40%: extra costs were too high (shipping, tax, fees)
• 20%: delivery was too slow
• 19%: they did not trust the site with their credit card information
• 18%: the site wanted them to create an account
• 17%: the checkout process was too long or complicated
• 17%: the website had errors or crashed
• 13%: the returns policy was not satisfactory
• 12%: they could not see or calculate the total order cost up front
• 10%: the credit card was declined
• 9%: there were not enough payment methods

Shoppers could give more than one reason, so the percentages add up to more than 100. Read together, they point at one theme: surprises. Costs that appear late, an account wall, a payment form that feels unsafe and a total that is hard to work out all break the trust a shopper had when they clicked “add to cart”.

Extra costs: the reason that matters most in Canada

Extra costs lead the list by far, and they deserve special attention in Canada. GST, HST or PST and QST change by province, shipping across the country can be expensive, and cross border duties surprise shoppers who buy from US stores. When a shopper in Halifax sees the HST and a shipping fee only on the last step, the order total can jump well above the price they had in mind. Showing an estimated total, including tax and delivery, on the cart page answers the 40% and the 12% groups at the same time.

Account creation and trust

Almost one shopper in five leaves when a store insists on an account before payment. A guest checkout, with an offer to save details after the order is placed, removes the wall without losing the customer record. Trust is the other half: 19% left because they did not trust the site with their card. Familiar payment options, a clear business name and address, visible contact details and a checkout that looks like the rest of the store all help.

Checkout length and form fields

Baymard’s large scale usability testing found that an ideal checkout flow can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements, or 7 to 8 if only form fields are counted. Its benchmark database shows that the average US checkout displays 23.48 form elements by default, including 14.88 form fields. For most checkouts, that leaves room for a 20% to 60% cut in what shoppers see.

The number of steps matters less than many owners expect. Baymard’s 2024 research found the average checkout for a new user is 5.1 steps long, counted from the cart to the order review, a figure that has barely moved since it began tracking large retailers in 2012. Its testing shows that the total number of fields a shopper must handle has a bigger effect on the experience than the number of steps those fields are spread across.

The prize is large. Baymard estimates that the average large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone, based on the usability issues it has documented as solvable over ten years of checkout testing. Applied to combined US and EU ecommerce sales of US$738 billion, that works out to about US$260 billion in recoverable orders. Its benchmark of 60 leading ecommerce sites found an average of 39 potential areas for checkout improvement, even on sites that had already run optimization projects.

Site speed and cart abandonment

Slow pages lose shoppers before they reach the cart. The Milliseconds Make Millions study, commissioned by Google and conducted by 55 and Deloitte, tracked 37 European and American brand sites and more than 30 million user sessions, monitoring mobile load times hour by hour for 30 days at the end of 2019. When retail sites improved four speed measures by 0.1 seconds:

• progression from a product listing page to a product page rose by 3.2%
• progression from a product page to the add to basket page rose by 9.1%
• retail shoppers spent 9.2% more

Travel sites in the same study saw a 2.2% increase in checkout completion. Google’s current page experience guidance gives store owners concrete thresholds to aim for: a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift score under 0.1. A checkout that jumps around while it loads, or a pay button that responds slowly, is where these numbers turn into lost orders.

Canadian ecommerce statistics that frame abandonment

How big is online retail in Canada?

Statistics Canada’s monthly retail trade survey, as summarized by the Nova Scotia Department of Finance and Treasury Board in February 2026, put Canada’s ecommerce sales for 2025 at $50.77 billion, or 6.1% of annual retail trade. In December 2025 alone, ecommerce sales rose 3.6% from the previous month to $4.26 billion, again 6.1% of total retail sales. Online is a small share of Canadian retail overall, which is why each abandoned cart represents a customer who already chose to shop online and then changed their mind.

How Canadians pay

Payments Canada’s 2025 Canadian Payment Methods and Trends report, covering 2024, counted 22.5 billion retail payment transactions worth $12.2 trillion. Credit cards made up 33% of payment volume and debit cards 30%, with credit cards averaging $105 per transaction. Contactless payments reached 13 billion transactions, 58% of total volume. The same report found that 13% of Canadians use social media or smart home devices to make purchases in a given month and that 28% find AI generated online shopping support appealing. For a store, the practical point is simple: offer the payment methods Canadians already use, and make card entry feel as safe as tapping a card at a till.

Mobile and desktop shoppers

Statcounter Global Stats measured Canadian web traffic in October 2026 at 50.7% desktop, 46.28% mobile and 3.02% tablet. Almost half of the people who reach your cart are on a phone, typing on a small keyboard. Every field you remove, every address you autocomplete and every wallet payment you offer matters more on that screen.

How to use these statistics in your store

Statistics are only useful when they change what you do next. These are the steps that follow directly from the figures above:

• Show the full cost early. Estimate tax by province and delivery on the cart page, before the shopper types an address. This addresses the largest reason on Baymard’s list.
• Offer guest checkout. Ask for an account after the order, not before it.
• Count your fields. List every field and checkbox in your checkout and compare the count with the 23.48 element average and the 12 to 14 element ideal.
• Make trust visible. Show your business name, contact details and returns policy near the payment step, and offer the card and wallet options Canadians use.
• Test for errors on phones. Run a real order on a mid range phone over mobile data each month. 17% of shoppers left a cart because the site had errors.
• Measure speed where it counts. Check the cart and checkout pages against Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds, not only the home page.
• Follow up with permission. Under Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL), a cart reminder email is a commercial electronic message, so it needs consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe link.

If you are planning a new store or rebuilding an old one, our ecommerce website design team builds checkouts around these findings, and the Shopify conversion rate optimization service focuses on the cart and checkout of an existing store. Before you build, the guide on what to plan before building an ecommerce website covers the decisions that come first.

Common mistakes when reading cart abandonment statistics

• Treating 70% as a failure rate. A large part of abandonment is browsing and comparison. The goal is to recover the fixable share, not to reach zero.
• Mixing up cart and checkout abandonment. Some studies count every cart created; others count only shoppers who started checkout. Compare like with like.
• Applying US reasons without a Canadian check. Baymard’s reasons come from US shoppers. Provincial sales tax, cross country shipping and bilingual expectations can make some reasons stronger in Canada.
• Quoting old numbers as current. Many statistics pages still repeat figures from 2012 to 2016 studies. Always look at the year a figure was measured.
• Ignoring device mix. With close to half of Canadian traffic on phones, a checkout that works well only on desktop will raise your rate.

What this means for a Canadian online store

About seven in ten carts are abandoned, and roughly four in ten of the shoppers who leave for a fixable reason cite extra costs. The average checkout shows far more fields than it needs, and small speed gains move shoppers further down the funnel. For a Canadian store, clear totals with provincial tax, a guest checkout, familiar payment methods and a fast, stable mobile checkout are the changes most directly supported by the numbers.

References

• Baymard Institute, “Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics” (average of 50 studies, reasons for abandonment and checkout benchmark): baymard.com
• Baymard Institute, “Checkout Optimization: 5 Ways to Minimize Form Fields in Checkout” (June 26, 2024): baymard.com
• Google, web.dev case study “Milliseconds Make Millions” (study by 55 and Deloitte): web.dev
• Google Search Central, “Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results”: developers.google.com
• Nova Scotia Department of Finance and Treasury Board, Daily Stats on Statistics Canada retail trade, December 2025 (table 20-10-0056-01): novascotia.ca
• Payments Canada, Canadian Payment Methods and Trends Report 2025, news release (October 2, 2025): payments.ca
• Payments Canada, report summary fact sheet 2025: payments.ca
• Statcounter Global Stats, desktop vs mobile vs tablet market share in Canada (October 2026): gs.statcounter.com

Frequently asked questions

What is the average shopping cart abandonment rate in 2026?

Baymard Institute's running average of 50 published studies puts the documented online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. In plain terms, about seven of every ten shoppers who add something to a cart leave without completing the order. Individual studies range from the mid 50% range to above 80%, depending on the stores, devices and years they measure.

Why do most shoppers abandon their carts?

Many are simply browsing: 42% of US online shoppers in Baymard's survey had abandoned a cart because they were not ready to buy. Among the fixable reasons, extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees lead at 40%, followed by slow delivery at 20%, distrust of the site with card details at 19% and forced account creation at 18%.

Is a 70% cart abandonment rate bad for my store?

Not on its own. A rate near 70% sits close to the documented average. What matters is your own trend and the share you can recover. A rate well above 80%, or a rate that rises after a site change, usually points to a checkout problem worth investigating.

How do I calculate my cart abandonment rate?

Divide the number of carts that did not become orders by the total number of carts created in the same period, then multiply by 100. Most ecommerce platforms and analytics tools report carts created and orders placed, so you can track the rate monthly and after every checkout change.

How many form fields should a checkout have?

Baymard's usability testing found an ideal checkout can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements, or 7 to 8 form fields. The average US checkout shows 23.48 form elements, including 14.88 fields, so most stores can remove a fifth to more than half of what shoppers see by default.

Does the number of checkout steps affect abandonment?

Less than most owners expect. The average checkout for a new user has 5.1 steps, and Baymard's research shows the total number of fields a shopper must fill in matters more than how many steps they are spread across. A clear five step checkout with few fields can outperform a crowded single page.

How much revenue can a better checkout recover?

Baymard estimates that the average large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone. Across combined US and EU ecommerce sales of US$738 billion, that represents about US$260 billion in orders that are recoverable through checkout improvements.

How does site speed affect cart abandonment?

Speed changes how far shoppers get. In the Milliseconds Make Millions study, a 0.1 second improvement in four speed measures raised retail progression from product page to basket by 9.1% and spending by 9.2%. Google recommends a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds and an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds.

How big is ecommerce in Canada?

Statistics Canada data published by Nova Scotia's Department of Finance and Treasury Board put Canadian retail ecommerce sales at $50.77 billion in 2025, or 6.1% of annual retail trade. In December 2025, ecommerce sales reached $4.26 billion. Close to half of Canadian web traffic now comes from phones, so mobile checkout quality matters.

Can I send abandoned cart emails in Canada?

Yes, with care. A cart reminder is a commercial electronic message under Canada's anti-spam legislation, so it needs valid consent, clear identification of your business and a working unsubscribe link. A well built ecommerce website captures that consent at the right point in checkout.