How to calculate and analyse add-to-cart rate in Amplitude
Add-to-cart rate — or add-to-basket % — is one of the most important KPIs for eCommerce sites. If you have set up Amplitude analytics tracking for your store on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Squarespace or another eCommerce platform, here is a guide on how to calculate add-to-cart rate.
Definition of add-to-cart rate
add-to-cart rate: the % of sessions in which a visitor adds a product to their cart
The important point here is that the metric is session-based, and that gives us a clue for which Amplitude events we will need to use.
Creating the add-to-cart rate chart
Step 1: Log in to your Amplitude account and create a funnel chart.
Step 2: Add “Start Session” as the first event, and “Add to Cart” as the second event.
Note: the exact naming of the events may differ in your project.
Step 3 (important!): in the middle panel, set the holding constant “Session ID”.
This ensures that only add-to-cart actions within the session are considered.
You can leave the “completed within” time window at 1 day — this will be more than enough to cover the session.
You can now see your add-to-cart rate, in this case 28%.
Step 4: save your chart and add it to a dashboard.
Benchmarking your add-to-cart rate
Now you know your add-to-cart rate, you’re probably interested to know whether it’s good or not!
Benchmarks can vary a lot for this, but the example from the screenshots (28%) is certainly not realistic.
average add-to-cart rate for Shopify stores is 4.4%. (Source: Littledata.io)
I’ve often heard rates of 7+% are considered good, but you should also consider a few factors:
- the price of your product: if you’re selling something expensive like a holiday, you should expect lower add-to-cart rates
- the source of your traffic: visitors coming from higher-intent channels like search have a higher probability to add-to-cart than lower-intent channels like social media.
My main recommendation is to monitor your add-to-cart rate over time and see how it responds to changes to your site and your traffic.
5 ways to analyse your add-to-cart rate
Let’s use the power of Amplitude to dig into your add-to-cart rate and generate some insights.
New vs Any Visitors
Open your chart, and then change the dropdown in the top-right from “Any” to “New” users.
Save a copy of this new chart and add it to your dashboard. You may well notice that the add-to-cart rate is lower than before when you included all users — returning visitors are always likely to have higher intent to purchase.
Rate over time
You might be interested to look at how your add-to-cart rate is changing over time.
Open the original chart again, and in middle panel choose “Conversion Over Time”.
We can see in my case that the rate fluctuates between 25% and 30%, and is seemingly lower on weekends.
If you ran a big marketing campaign, you might be interested in how the rate changed during that period. You can play with the date picker to slice the data for a particular time period or to look at the evolution by week or month.
Channel breakdown
If you have Amplitude referrer or UTM tracking set up, you can break down your add-to-cart rate by where the visitor has come from.
To do this, open up the original chart and in the middle panel select broken down by “Step 1” and then either “UTM Source” or “referring domain”
For my example project the rates by channel are very similar, but you’ll likely see bigger differences for your own store.
Country breakdown
Using exactly the same approach you can get a breakdown by country:
Device breakdown
Finally, with the same approach and selecting “Device Family” you’ll see your performance across different platforms:
Want help improving your add-to-cart rate?
I hope you found this intro insightful, and feel inspired to look deeper!
I run a small product analytics agency Permutable, and am an official Amplitude partner. Via analysis and a/b testing I can help you improve your add-to-cart rate and perform further analysis and optimisation on your store.
For example, we can:
- break down the add-to-cart rate by product and category
- use Amplitude segmentation tools to find and target different personas
- analyse the average number of items added to cart
- look at the relationship with channel, price, and average order value
- run various a/b tests on your homepage, category pages, and product pages
Get in touch if you’re interested!
