Of every ten people who add a product to their cart in an online store, around seven leave without buying. It is not a flaw in your store, it is the sector average. The difference between the brands that leave that money on the table and the ones that recover part of it comes down to having a system that reminds those people their purchase was left half-finished, and wins the sale back.
Recovering abandoned carts is one of the most profitable things an ecommerce can set up, because you are speaking to people who already wanted to buy. There is no need to create the desire, only to rescue an intention that already existed. In this guide we explain why carts get abandoned, how to build the flow that recovers them, and which best practices make the difference.
What an abandoned cart is
An abandoned cart is a purchase someone starts (they add products to the cart or even begin checkout) but does not finish. The abandonment rate measures what percentage of those carts go unpaid, and in most stores it sits around 70%.
It is important to understand that not every abandoned cart is a lost sale. Plenty of people use the cart as a wish list, compare prices, or get distracted halfway through. That is exactly why recovery works: some of those people did intend to buy and just need a nudge.
Not all carts are equal: start with your customer
Before you start designing this flow's emails, you have to understand who your target customer is, what they buy and why. The decision process changes with the product, and a flow that ignores that sounds generic and converts less. Let me explain it with three examples:
- A €15 phone case. A quick, emotional decision. Whoever abandons it almost never doubts the product: they got distracted or compared prices for a moment. Price matters, urgency works and the window is short (1 or 2 days). The approach has to be nimble: a short sequence, a quick reminder, urgency or scarcity, and a small incentive that can come in earlier without hurting the margin.
- A €400 occasion dress. A slow decision, emotionally charged and almost always tied to an event. They do not abandon over price, but over doubt: "will it suit me?", "will it arrive in time?", "what if I have to return it?". An aggressive discount here cheapens an aspirational purchase. The approach is the opposite, to reassure (resolve the sizing, show the garment on different bodies, make returns and timelines crystal clear, offer a stylist's help).
- A €70 skincare serum. A cautious decision, held back by a single doubt: "what if it doesn't work for me?". They do not abandon the cart over the brand or the price, but over the fear of spending the money and seeing no results. The approach is to prove it works and remove the risk: results-focused reviews, before-and-after photos, real testimonials, explaining why it works (ingredients, evidence) and, above all, a satisfaction guarantee or an easy return.
| Phone case · €15 | Occasion dress · €400 | Skincare serum · €70 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How they decide | Quick, emotional | Slow, considered | Cautious, looks for proof |
| Why they abandon | Distraction, price | Doubt: size, timelines, returns | Fear it won't work |
| Window | Short (1-2 days) | Long (several days) | Medium, thinks it over |
| Lever | Urgency and price | Reassurance and proof | Proof of results and guarantee |
| Incentive | Useful, can come earlier | Secondary, may cheapen | Guarantee beats discount |
The conclusion guides this whole guide: the flow you are about to see is a solid starting point, but the content, the timing and the incentive of each message adjust to how your customer decides. Anyone treating every cart the same leaves money, and margin, on the table.
Why carts get abandoned
Before recovering, it helps to understand what stops a purchase. The most common causes we have identified are:
Unexpected costs at the end, above all the shipping charges that appear at the last step. It is the number one reason for abandonment.
A long or complicated checkout, with too many steps or fields, or one that forces you to create an account to buy.
A lack of trust, when the store does not convey security at the moment of payment (an underworked template, excessive use of AI, low-quality photos, no reviews, an unclear returns policy).
Too few payment options, or the absence of the method that person wanted to use (cards, PayPal, instalment payments, each country's local payment options).
Or, simply, that the person was not ready: they were comparing, browsing, or leaving it for later.
The first two are best fixed by improving your checkout. The rest are worked on by making improvements to your online store.
The recovery flow: the heart of the system
Recovery is built as an automation that triggers when someone abandons the cart and sends them a sequence of messages over the following days. The key is not a single email, but a well-thought-out sequence. This is the structure that works best:
| Message | When | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Email 1 | After about an hour | An almost transactional reminder. Abandoned products and a button linking straight to the cart. No discount. |
| Email 2 | After 24 hours | Resolves objections: shipping, returns, doubts. Adds social proof (reviews). |
| Email 3 | After 48-72 hours | Last call. Here you can bring in an incentive (free shipping or a discount) and some urgency. |
The logic behind these three steps matters. The first recovers whoever simply got distracted, without giving away margin. The second goes after whoever was hesitating over something specific and resolves it. And only the third, once you have exhausted the other options, resorts to the incentive. Starting by giving away a discount in the first email is a mistake: you teach your customers to abandon the cart on purpose to get a coupon every time they want to buy.
And remember what we saw earlier: these timings and this incentive are the starting point, not a template. On an impulse purchase the sequence shortens and urgency carries more weight. On a considered purchase the decision window lengthens and the reassurance you give the customer (sizing, returns, shipping) takes priority. The structure is the same; the content, the approach and the number of emails adjust to your customer's decision process.
Worth stressing: this flow can be shortened or lengthened to suit your approach, from an abandoned-cart flow of 12 emails sent over 2 months to flows of 2 emails, with a purely transactional, reminder-style approach.
A little trick that works very well for us: sending plain-text emails (like the one you would send a friend over Gmail). You achieve two things: you surprise the customer with an email that is not a newsletter but a personal message, and, by having no images or links, you stand a better chance of landing in the primary inbox (which dramatically increases opens).
If this kind of email interests you, we have an article on different ways to get the most out of plain-text emails.
Split the flow: not everyone who abandons is the same
The same flow receives very different people, and if you send everyone the same message, you miss the chance to adapt it and lift conversion. Two ways we split this flow with our clients are:
By their relationship with the brand: first time or existing customer? Both new and returning customers enter the flow, and they should not receive the same thing. The new customer has to be won over: build trust, introduce the brand, remove the fear of a first purchase, and here a welcome incentive can make sense. The one who already knows you does not need convincing that you are reliable, so the message is more direct, leans on their history, avoids giving away a discount to someone who was probably going to buy anyway, and leaves room to recommend related products. Splitting the flow into these two branches lifts recovery and protects margin.
By the value of the purchase: recovering €30 is not the same as recovering €800. The higher the ticket, the more a tailored approach is justified. A high-AOV cart deserves more care, even a personal touch instead of one more automated email. A B2B customer (depending on your business) plays by other rules: several people deciding, a need for a quote or invoice, longer timelines, and sometimes what recovers the sale is not an email but someone from the team writing to them. And a VIP customer does not want a generic coupon, they want a premium experience, priority attention and some exclusive advantage. Segmenting by value lets you concentrate the effort where the most is at stake.
Not just email: SMS, push and retargeting
Email is the base, but not the only channel. Combining it multiplies recovery:
SMS has an extremely high open rate and works very well as a brief reminder between the emails, above all for the last call. It has to be used with judgement so as not to saturate.
Push notifications recover whoever browsed from mobile or gave permission, with no sending cost.
Paid retargeting (the dynamic ads that show the exact product you left behind) closes the loop for whoever does not open your emails. Here recovery crosses over with your paid media campaigns.
The ideal is to coordinate every channel in a single journey, not treat them as separate actions.
Best practices that make the difference
Beyond the structure, these details are what separate a flow that recovers from one that can even annoy:
Show the product and use a single button. The email should show what they left in the cart, with its photo, and take them back to checkout in one click. No distractions, no twenty links.
Save the discount for the end. As I mentioned before, the incentive is the last bullet, not the first. And if you can recover without a discount, all the better for your margin.
Resolve the real objection. If people abandon over shipping, talk about shipping. If it is about trust, add reviews and your returns policy. The email that answers the specific doubt converts more. (This is why it is so important to talk to your customers to understand their frustrations and barriers to buying for the first time.)
Mind the subject line. It is what decides whether they open. A specific, human subject works better than the typical "Did you forget something?".
Optimise for mobile. Most people will open the email on their phone. If the button is so small it cannot be tapped, or the checkout is awkward on mobile, you lose the recovery.
Capturing the email earlier: the piece almost nobody builds
There is a detail that limits the whole strategy: you can only send a recovery email if you have that person's email. And a lot of people abandon the cart before leaving it.
That is why a good recovery strategy starts before the cart, capturing the email as early as you can: with a welcome popup, an exit-intent popup, or by asking for the address at the start of checkout. The sooner you have the email, the more abandoned carts you can reach. Without that data, recovery is left hobbled.
Reducing abandonment at the source
Recovering is good, but preventing abandonment is better. Alongside the flow, it pays to work on the checkout:
Show the shipping costs as early as possible, with no surprises at the end. Allow guest checkout, without forcing registration. Offer several payment methods. Reduce steps and fields to the minimum. And reinforce trust on the payment page with reviews and a clear returns policy.
Every point of friction you remove is a cart you will not have to recover later.
How to measure whether it works
To know whether your recovery is paying off, look above all at the recovery rate (what percentage of abandoned carts end in a purchase thanks to the flow) and the revenue per recipient of the sequence. Those two numbers tell you whether the system is working.
And, as with everything, what matters is the profit it leaves, not just the opens. A well-built recovery flow is among the best in the whole ecommerce for return per euro spent, because the cost is minimal and you are speaking to people who already wanted to buy.
What average metrics you can expect
As a reference, and bearing in mind that it varies a lot by sector, product and AOV, a well-built cart flow usually moves within these ranges:
| Flow metric | Average reference | Brands that optimise it |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 40-50% | 60% or more |
| Recovery rate | 3-5% of carts | 10-14% |
| Revenue per recipient | around €3-4 | considerably more |
Two important nuances. The open rate is skewed upwards by Apple's privacy features, so the metric that really matters is not that one, but the recovery rate and the revenue per recipient. And the format weighs heavily: going from a single email to a sequence of three can multiply recovered revenue by six or seven, so building the full sequence pays for itself.
The tools
The recovery flow is built on your email marketing platform. At STRAT we work mainly with Klaviyo and Omnisend, two of the leading platforms for ecommerce and ones we are an agency partner of. Both bring the abandoned-cart flow ready to personalise, with email, SMS and push in the same place. Even so, what matters is not the tool itself, but having the sequence, the timing and the content of each message finely tuned.
Mistakes we see often
- Building a single email instead of a sequence, and letting slip whoever needed a second or third touch.
- Starting by giving away a discount, and training people to abandon on purpose.
- Not capturing the email before checkout, and being left unable to recover most people.
- Sending a generic email, with no product photo or a clear button back to the cart.
- Forgetting to measure, and not knowing how much is really being recovered.
How we do it at STRAT
We build recovery as a complete system, not as a stray email: we capture the contact as early as possible, we design the email, SMS and push sequence with the timing and content finely tuned, we save the incentive for when it is needed, and we coordinate it with paid media retargeting. And we measure it by what really matters, the recovered revenue and the profitability, not by stray opens. It is one of the retention levers that pays for the work soonest.
Frequently asked questions
What is an abandoned cart? It is a purchase someone starts (they add products to the cart or begin payment) but does not finish. In most stores, around 70% of carts are abandoned, so recovering them is a big opportunity.
How many emails should I send to recover a cart? The most effective approach is a sequence of three: a reminder after an hour, one after 24 hours that resolves objections, and a last one after 48-72 hours with an incentive if needed. A single email recovers far less.
Should I offer a discount to recover the cart? As a last resort, not a first one. If you start by giving away a discount, you teach people to abandon the cart on purpose. Try to recover first without an incentive and save the discount for the final message.
Why do so many carts get abandoned? The most common causes are unexpected shipping costs at the end, a long checkout or one that forces registration, a lack of trust and too few payment options. Many people are also just comparing or browsing.
Can carts be recovered by SMS as well as email? Yes. SMS has a very high open rate and works well as a reminder between the emails, above all for the last call. The ideal is to combine email, SMS and push in a single flow.
Does the recovery flow work the same for every product? No. The decision process changes with what you sell. An impulse purchase (a cheap product) is recovered with a short sequence, urgency and an incentive that can come in earlier. A considered, high-ticket purchase is recovered with a longer window and, above all, by giving reassurance (sizing, returns, timelines) rather than discounts. The skeleton of the flow is similar, but the content, the timing and the incentive adapt to how your customer decides.
Is it worth splitting the flow for new and returning customers? Yes. A first-time customer needs trust and, perhaps, a welcome incentive; one who has already bought from you does not need convincing that you are reliable, so the message is more direct and usually without a discount. It also helps to split by purchase value: a high-ticket cart, a B2B customer or a VIP customer deserve a more tailored approach than a small order.
How much money are you letting slip through abandoned carts? At STRAT we build the recovery system (email, SMS and retargeting) that rescues those sales and we measure it in profitability. Find out with our ecommerce email marketing service.
