Picture ten people walking into a Gold Coast shop, picking products off the shelf, carrying them to the counter, then putting them down and walking out. That's online retail, every day. Baymard Institute's research puts average cart abandonment around 70%, meaning most shoppers who add something to their cart never finish the purchase.
Think about what that means for your store. For every order you take, there are roughly two more sitting unfinished in abandoned carts. You already paid to get those shoppers there, through ads, SEO or content. They found a product they liked. They added it to the cart. Then something stopped them.
The good news is that a shopper who carted a product is the warmest lead your store will ever see, and a proper recovery system brings a real share of them back. If you're on Shopify, open your admin right now and look at Orders, then Abandoned checkouts. That list is the recoverable revenue this article is about.
Why People Abandon Carts in the First Place
Some abandonment is unavoidable. People browse on the bus, compare prices on their lunch break, or window shop with no intention of buying today. You won't recover all of them and you shouldn't try. But Baymard's checkout research consistently finds that a large share of abandonment comes from fixable problems:
- Surprise costs. Shipping, fees or taxes that only appear at checkout. This is the most commonly cited reason shoppers give for abandoning.
- Forced account creation. Being made to register before buying sends people straight back to Google.
- A long or confusing checkout. Too many steps, too many form fields, unclear error messages.
- Trust concerns. The site doesn't feel safe enough to hand over card details.
- Slow delivery or unclear returns. If shoppers can't see when it arrives or how returns work, they hesitate.
- Payment options. No PayPal, no Apple Pay, no buy-now-pay-later when the shopper expected one.
Understanding the reason matters because recovery and prevention work together. The emails win back the shoppers you lost. Fixing the causes means you lose fewer in the first place.
The Recovery Email Sequence
The core of abandoned cart recovery is a three-email sequence, built in a platform like Klaviyo and triggered automatically the moment a checkout is started but not completed. It's part of the broader set of flows we covered in the 5 email flows every ecommerce store needs, and it's usually the most profitable one per send.
Email 1: The Reminder (1-2 hours later)
Short and friendly. Show the exact product with a photo and one button straight back to their cart. No discount. Many shoppers just got distracted and this nudge is all they need.
Email 2: The Objection Handler (24 hours later)
Answer the questions that stopped them. Shipping times, returns policy, guarantees, and a couple of strong customer reviews on the product they left behind.
Email 3: The Closer (2-3 days later)
Your last word. If margins allow, a small incentive like free shipping or a modest discount, framed with a genuine deadline. If you'd rather protect margin, lean on scarcity: stock levels, popularity, or the offer ending.
Two rules keep this sequence healthy. First, don't lead with a discount, or you'll train repeat customers to abandon on purpose. Second, write like a human. "Looks like you left this behind" beats corporate-speak every time.
Timing matters more than most stores realise. The first email needs to land while the shopper still remembers the product and the impulse is warm. Wait a full day and you're competing with every other tab they opened since. And always link to the cart itself, not your homepage. Every extra click between the email and the checkout costs you a slice of the recoveries.
Layering SMS and Retargeting on Top
Email does the heavy lifting, but it's not the only channel. Two additions make a noticeable difference once the email sequence is live.
SMS. Text messages get opened fast, usually within minutes, which makes them ideal for cart recovery where timing matters. One well-timed text, sent to subscribers who opted in, with a direct link back to the cart, complements the email sequence rather than replacing it. Keep it to one or two messages. SMS is personal space, and stores that spam it burn the channel quickly. Australian stores also need proper opt-in consent under the Spam Act, so only message people who genuinely subscribed.
Retargeting ads. Anyone who carted a product can be shown that product again on Facebook and Instagram through dynamic retargeting. The ad follows up where email can't reach: people who never gave you their email address at all. Cart abandoners are a small audience, so the spend is modest and the intent is high. We build these audiences as standard in our ecommerce ad campaigns, and they're reliably among the best performing ad sets in the account.
The order of priority: email first, retargeting second, SMS third. Each layer catches people the previous one missed.
Reducing Abandonment at the Source
Recovery is the safety net. The bigger long-term win is needing it less. Go back to the reasons people abandon and fix them one by one:
- Show shipping costs early. On the product page or in the cart, not as a surprise at the final step. If you can offer free shipping over a threshold, say so everywhere.
- Allow guest checkout. Let people buy first and create an account after, if they want one.
- Cut the form down. Every field you remove is a few more completed checkouts. Enable address autocomplete.
- Add express payment options. Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal let mobile shoppers skip typing card details entirely.
- Make trust visible. Reviews, clear returns, contact details and a real business behind the site. Shoppers notice when something feels off.
Most of these are conversion rate fundamentals, and they overlap heavily with the fixes in our guide to increasing your Shopify conversion rate. A store that converts well abandons less, and a store that abandons less makes every ad dollar work harder. This is the kind of compounding we build into client stores as part of our growth systems work.
What to Expect When It's All Running
Be realistic: you will never recover every abandoned cart, and anyone promising that is selling something. But the combination of a proper email sequence, retargeting and source fixes consistently turns a meaningful slice of lost checkouts back into orders, month after month, with no ongoing effort once it's built.
The best part is the economics. These are shoppers you already paid to acquire, so recovered orders come through at close to zero additional cost. For most stores the entire setup pays for itself within the first few weeks of recovered sales, and then keeps paying indefinitely. Set it up once, check the numbers monthly, and improve the weakest email each time. That's it.
If you'd rather skip the learning curve, this is bread and butter work for us at MakeItScale. We're based on the Gold Coast and we build cart recovery and email marketing systems for Australian ecommerce stores every week. Get in touch or book a time to call and we'll show you exactly how much revenue is sitting in your abandoned checkouts right now.
