Negative cart abandonment rate

[rafaels69105856]

Hello, Is there a reason other than incorrect implementation (sending negative values) that a  cart abandonment rate could be negative?

I did not see this in real life, I was asked about it in a job interview question.

Thanks!

Rafael

[Bhoomika_S · Accepted solution]

Hello @rafaels69105856 ,

Generally, a negative cart abandonment rate isn’t something you’d see in real unless there’s an implementation issue. Since cart abandonment rates are calculated based on cart adds versus checkouts, a negative rate could only happen if there were an error in tracking or reporting-such as mistakenly capturing negative values in the data.

In normal, this isn’t expected behaviour, as the logic of abandonment rates should always yield a positive or zero value. Another potential reason could be timing issues with cross-session checkouts. While this won’t produce true “negative values,” timing mismatches can lead to strange results. If many users add to the cart and then complete the checkout later (outside the reporting window), you might see results where checkouts appear to exceed cart adds temporarily, though it wouldn’t produce literal negative values.

It sounds like the interview question was testing your understanding of data accuracy and implementation, where tracking errors or misconfigurations could result in unusual numbers.

Hope that helps!

[rafaels69105856]

Thanks so much Bhoomika!

Agreed, I can't think of a reason it can be negative and being that scAdd and purchase are event counters, they can only increment so nothing a dev could mess up such as sending a negative counter to the dataLayer or so....