Shopify Glossary Terms

Cart abandonment occurs when a customer adds items to their shopping cart but leaves the store without completing the purchase. The average ecommerce cart abandonment rate sits around 70%, meaning roughly 7 out of 10 customers who add something to cart don't buy.

The causes are well-documented: unexpected shipping costs, complicated checkout processes, account creation requirements, slow page loads, and comparison shopping. For Shopify Plus merchants, reducing cart abandonment is one of the highest-ROI optimisation exercises because you're converting traffic you've already paid to acquire.

Shopify Plus gives you several tools to fight abandonment: Shop Pay for one-tap checkout, checkout extensibility for reducing friction, and native abandoned checkout recovery emails. Layering Klaviyo's abandoned cart flows on top provides more sophisticated follow-up sequencing with dynamic product recommendations and urgency-based messaging.

Think: the revenue that's already in your store — it just hasn't checked out yet.