Through Barrel’s work with hundreds of clients selling on Shopify, we know that abandoned shopping carts are a common problem for brands, with some studies suggesting that roughly 7 in 10 ecommerce shoppers abandon their carts. 

Understanding the nature of your customers, their motivations for adding items to their shopping carts, and other factors can greatly improve customer conversion rates and increase sales.   

We’ve partnered with Databox, an analytics platform company, to run a benchmarking study around ecommerce performance on Shopify.

These benchmarks, focused on shopping cart behavior, will allow Shopify merchants to see how they stack up against other merchants while also identifying opportunities for improvement.

Members of the benchmarking group can even track their performance vs. the benchmark over time, making it easy to see progress or the lack thereof. The best part:

• It's 100% anonymous. Rest easy knowing your data remains confidential.
• It's 100% free. Gain insights without any financial commitment. 

For a sneak peek into our study, check out our benchmark data for March 2024 below.

How to Read the Benchmark Charts

The charts below are dynamically generated daily, by Databox’s free benchmarking software. 

At first glance, they might seem a bit complex, but don't worry – it's easier to understand than you might think.

The chart to the right shows the distribution of abandoned shopping carts across the sample.

The blue vertical line represents your company's performance (in this case, a Barrel client) for the previous month. The chart also shows you:

The bottom 25% of performers (those struggling to keep up)

The top 25% of high-flyers (the ones setting the pace)

The median value (the midpoint where half perform better, and half perform worse)

With this information, you can quickly gauge whether you're ahead of the curve or lagging behind.

Intrigued? Join our benchmarking group here, connect your data and unlock a world where you can see how you truly measure up, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions.

Shopping Cart Benchmarks for Shopify Storefronts

For a brand selling on ecommerce, a successful sale is the culmination of a long process that at a minimum: 

• Attracts potential customers to your storefront
• Offers customers products that meet their specific needs at a compelling price point
• Allows customers to add items to a shopping cart
• Provides an efficient checkout experience that converts shopping carts into sales
• Processes orders and ships products to customers

All of these steps are critical - which is to say that a failure at any one of these phases represents a lost opportunity for an ecommerce company. Optimizing and streamlining the checkout experience is an often overlooked strategy to effectively increase sales.

Shopping cart abandonment occurs when a visitor to your website adds an item to their shopping cart and then leaves without completing a purchase. To understand how shopping cart abandonment affects an organization’s sales conversion efficiency, we have identified four metrics:

Abandoned Checkouts - Number of shopping carts abandoned by customers during the specified date range

Orders - Number of completed orders received during the specified date range

Gross and Net Sales - Amount of sales generated during the specified date range

According to our benchmark group, the median abandoned checkouts in a group of 120+ Shopify storefronts during the full month of March 2024 was 158, while the median value for Orders was 337.5. 

Below are two charts showing the distribution of Abandoned Checkouts and Orders values for one of the group members (we removed our member’s name, of course, since these benchmark comparisons are anonymous and private to each company):

In March 2024, our representative member had among the highest Abandoned Checkouts (1.57k) as well as Orders (6.58k) in our sample. While the elevated level of Abandoned Checkouts is a concern, when examined in context with Orders, we find that Abandoned Checkouts/Orders ratio or Abandonment Rate is 24%, which is actually quite favorable compared to the ratios using the sample medians (47%). The data suggests that this survey member is actually very efficient in converting shopping cart items into completed orders.

According to Databox's global database, the Abandonment Rate is usually between 50-60%. In other benchmark reports online, we find this number to be up to 70%. 

While this survey respondent has an impressive Abandonment Rate, we can roughly estimate the potential opportunity for further lowering their Abandonment Rate. Given gross sales of $256.90k and $241.74k in March 2024, decreasing the Abandonment Rate by 5% could increase gross sales by $10,600 and net sales by nearly $10,000 per month. 

This group member has been able to outperform the group significantly. With great Abandonment Rate statistics and high sales, they’re clearly doing a great job attracting and engaging site visitors and converting them into customers. 

Based on the data from the benchmark group, it is much easier to determine the next steps to improve the customer experience. In this case, a deeper audit of the shopfront to tweak certain aspects of the buying experience may make a lot of sense. Optimizing the checkout process usually ranges from implementing strategies as simple as providing multiple payment options to more complex efforts such as a well-integrated abandoned cart follow-up email campaign and/or UX changes. 

Get your Free Benchmark Report

Ready to see how your abandoned checkout statistics stack up against this group of 100+ ecommerce storefronts? Get full, free access just by signing up for our Databox-powered Benchmark Group here or contact us if you’d like us to help you.