Why carts get abandoned
Most carts never convert. Buyers get distracted, hit unexpected shipping cost, or are just comparing. Recovery tries to win some of them back without being annoying.
How recovery works
- Detect abandonment when a cart has items but no checkout for a threshold time.
- Trigger a reminder over email or push, often in a short sequence with increasing nudges.
- Personalize with the cart contents and sometimes a time limited incentive.
System design concerns
- Run a scheduler that scans for stale carts or react to inactivity events.
- Respect consent and frequency caps so you do not spam or break rules.
- Hold the cart server side so the link restores the exact items, and measure incremental conversion against a control group.
Key idea
Abandonment recovery detects stale carts past a threshold, sends consented and capped reminders that restore the saved cart, and measures incremental lift against a control group.