2016 Black Friday Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

Chart of the Day: Black Friday and Cyber Monday Cart Abandonment Rates Jump to 68%

Cart Abandonment is the scourge of ecommerce retailers everywhere, and this year it seems to be on the increase. New data emerging from the two busiest ecommerce days of 2016 (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) shows extremely high cart abandonment rates across the board. These are particularly high on mobile devices, where 78% of carts are abandoned.

Ecommerce retailers should be asking themselves, are 4 out of 5 people abandoning their carts because they're having second thoughts about purchasing, or is it because the checkout pages aren't properly optimized for mobile? If a customer has to use fiddly forms that are hard to complete on a Smartphone they are far more likely to abandon their cart.

It's not all bad news though. Although the cart abandonment rates are huge, many of these customers can be nudged into purchasing through well-crafted cart abandonment emails reminding or encouraging them to complete their purchase. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year these emails had an average conversion rate of 17.6%, which is pretty tasty. If you aren't running a cart abandonment email campaign you could be missing out on a huge potential stream of revenue. If 68% of customers abandon their carts and 17.6% of them can be converted by email, then cart abandonment emails could be contributing 10-11% of all sales.