Cart Recovery Rate
Percentage of abandoned shopping carts successfully recovered through retargeting or cart abandonment email campaigns
What is Cart Recovery Rate?
Cart recovery rate is the percentage of abandoned shopping carts that later result in a purchase. It shows how well reminders and follow-up bring shoppers back.
Because these shoppers have already chosen products, recovering them is one of the cheapest ways to add sales.
How this KPI is measured
- Function
- Marketing
- Sub-function
- eCommerce
- Industry
- All Industries
- Type
- Lagging
- Impact
- Revenue
- Unit
- %
- Measurement frequency
- Weekly / Monthly
- Formula
- (Recovered carts resulting in purchase / Total abandoned carts) × 100
How to calculate it
Divide the number of recovered carts that resulted in a purchase by the total number of abandoned carts, and multiply by 100.
For example, if 2,000 carts were abandoned and 260 later became purchases after follow-up, the rate is (260 / 2,000) x 100 = 13%.
Record whether the purchase followed a recovery message. Some shoppers would have returned anyway, so compare with a group that received no message where possible.
Where it is used
Evaluating recovery emails
Test timing, content and offers.
Estimating extra revenue
Forecast the sales that recovery adds.
Improving checkout
Combine with abandonment data to find fixes.
How to improve it
Tips and common mistakes
- Use a holdout group to measure the true effect of recovery messages.
- Do not discount every time, or shoppers learn to abandon.
- Respect consent rules for marketing messages.
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