How to Calculate Add to Cart Rate

Keeping tabs on your ecommerce sites’ add to cart rate, (also known as ATB rate, or Add to Basket rate) can help to identify where issues are occurring on your site.

Add to cart rate is the percentage of users who add one of your products to the basket, out of the total number of site views. It’s an important KPI to measure as it works hand in hand with bounce rate to give a helpful insight into your website’s performance.

Whilst ATB rate is an important KPI to monitor and improve, it can be difficult to find ways to improve it. Check out our free, comprehensive Add to Basket rate course, packed full of ideas and knowledge on how to improve your ecommerce website’s ATB rate.

What you can learn from your add to cart rate

ATB rates vary from site to site, and are dependent on a wide variety of factors, but on average, is around 5%. Regardless of whether your ATB rate is above or below average, you can learn a lot about the following areas:

User Experience

Is your website organised and easy to navigate? If your ATB rate is quite low, you’ll likely need to improve the UX (User Experience). Websites with better UX will drive more conversions.

How easy is it for users to find what they’re looking for? Can they navigate through your site with minimal effort, with products organised logically? The easier it is for a user to add a product to their basket, the more likely they are to do it.

Optimisation

Have you optimised your website for mobile? Over three quarters of users make purchases from mobile devices, so this is something you can’t afford to ignore.

You can test whether optimisation has an impact on your ATB rate by viewing ATB rate for different devices.

If desktop performs better than mobile devices, then it’s clear that mobile optimisation is a key area to work on.

How to calculate ATB rate

The formula for calculating ATB rate is very simple, and if you use analytics software such as Google Analytics, this figure will be calculated for you.

the total number of product adds to basket divided by the total number of views of the product, multiplied by 100

Average ATB rates

As previously mentioned, ATB rates depend on a variety of factors, including industry, relevancy of products on offer, usability of the site and much more.

The table below shows some benchmarks of where your website might lie in terms of ATB rate.

Less than 2.6% ATB Rate	2.6% – 8.2% ATB Rate	8.2% – 10.4% ATB Rate	10.4%+ ATB Rate
Worst 20% of sites	Average	Top 20% of all sites	Top 10% of all sites

 

If your ATB rates are lower than average, there’s a great opportunity for improvement on your website.

How to improve your add to cart rate

So you’ve established that the ATB rate needs improvement, but you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed in terms of where to begin.

In our free Add to Basket rate course, we’ve broken down the product page into 4 steps; the Buy Area, Product Images, Product Descriptions and Shipping & Returns, as well as helping you to understand more about your users and the 3 stages of purchasing.

Some top tips from our course include:

• Use a strong contrasting background colour for your Add to Basket button to make sure the button stands out to users
• Include an image that shows the scale/size of the product being viewed to manage users expectations. There’s nothing like ordering a product online only for it to arrive and be significantly smaller or larger than you expected!
• Include user reviews to ensure your product page offers valuable social proof. This in turn builds trust of your products
• Show delivery costs before users get to the checkout to avoid nasty surprises and increase the likelihood of a false Add to Basket rates

How to improve and optimise your product pages

Download our free Add to Basket rate course to help increase the ATB rate on your ecommerce site.

Our top tips and advice will give you some new things to consider, and use the checklist at the end of each topic to make sure you’ve applied each technique.

If you’re looking for further guidance to increase your ecommerce website’s ATB rate, make sure you find a knowledgeable and experienced agency.