Wishlist, Back-in-Stock & Cart Abandonment Statistics 2026

Shoppers say they use wishlists mainly to track price changes (16.8%), share their list with others (9.6%), or keep an eye on out-of-stock items until they return (7.5%).

Bizrate Insights

Wishlist feature preference drops sharply with age. 27.86% of 18-29 year olds want the feature, compared to 16.34% of 30-49 year olds, 11.41% of 50-64 year olds, and just 9% of shoppers 65 and older.

Bizrate Insights

59% of shoppers say they abandoned a cart in the past three months because they were just browsing and not ready to buy.

Drip

The average online shopping cart abandonment rate sits at 70.22%.

Baymard Institute

The top reasons shoppers abandon a cart are extra costs like shipping and taxes being higher than expected (48%), being forced to create an account (26%), a checkout process that feels too long or complicated (22%), not trusting the site with payment details (18%), and not seeing the total cost upfront (17%).

Baymard Institute

Cart abandonment costs online retailers an estimated $18 billion a year in lost sales.

SellersCommerce

Mobile shoppers abandon their cart more often than desktop shoppers, at 80.45% compared to 68.62%.

Dynamic Yield

Wishlist-to-purchase conversion rates typically range from 5% to 20%, with triggered email programs like price-drop and back-in-stock alerts landing at the higher end.

KISSmetrics

One retailer automated price-drop emails on wishlisted items and saw wishlist conversion rise from 8% to 22%, cutting the average time from wishlist to purchase from 45 days to 18 days.

KISSmetrics

Back-in-stock emails achieve a 59.19% open rate and a 5.34% conversion rate, and were ranked the highest-converting automated email type in 2025 at 6.46%.

Omnisend

A case study found one retailer's back-in-stock alerts converting at 22.45% on average.

MarketingSherpa

Back-in-stock emails see a 65.32% open rate, the highest of any campaign type analyzed, and convert at 14%, compared to 8.17% for all email types combined.

Barilliance, via Drip

Back-in-stock notification programs can lift revenue by 5% to 15% for merchants that use them, with the strongest conversions happening in the first 24 hours after sending.

Voxwise

Customers who opt into back-in-stock and price-drop notifications show 30% to 40% higher lifetime value than customers who don't.

Voxwise

Price-drop alerts convert at 8% to 15%, compared to roughly 1.5% to 2.5% for standard store-wide conversion rates.

Store Owner Tips

43% of shoppers say high prices are the reason they hesitate on a purchase, which is exactly the friction price-drop alerts are designed to remove.

Store Owner Tips

Most shoppers who abandon a cart don't mean to leave for good. About 75% say they plan on coming back later to finish the purchase.

Bloomreach

The median shopper takes 41 days from wishlisting an item to completing the purchase, based on a multi-industry study of 49,000 merchant accounts and millions of shopper sessions.

Swym

74.7% of purchases happen within 30 days of an item being wishlisted, while the remaining 25.3% take up to 120 days or longer.

Swym

Purchase timelines vary sharply by category. Consumer electronics shoppers convert fastest, averaging just 18.56 days, with 84.55% completing their purchase within the first month.

Swym

Customers who use save for later are 2 to 3 times more likely to eventually complete a purchase than shoppers who don't use it.

Store Owner Tips

Almost half of shoppers, 49.04%, ignore wishlist features entirely, often because the feature is hard to find or use.

Store Owner Tips