What Is Cart Recovery? Reach and Real Cost

Recovery only starts once the shopper is gone. Keeping them from leaving in the first place is a different job, and it's called prevention.

Who Your Reminders Can Reach

Every recovery message needs a way to reach the shopper. Email and text need an address or a phone number. Retargeting ads skip that step, but you pay for them.

Trouble is, most abandoned carts end before checkout, and checkout is where shoppers usually type in their email. Across 958 Shopify stores in our data, 76.04% of carts were abandoned. 58% of carts never reached checkout, and 43% of shoppers who started checkout didn't finish. You'll find the full breakdown in our cart abandonment statistics.

Example: 1,000 carts at a shoe store

Take a shoe store that hits those averages.

580 carts (58%) never reach checkout.
420 start checkout. About 180 of them (43%) leave before paying.
That's about 760 abandoned carts, or 76%.

Shopify's abandoned checkout emails can reach those 180 shoppers at most. That's fewer than 1 in 4 of the lost carts. The other 580 left before checkout, so you can only email them if you already know who they are (from an earlier sign-up, for example).

What a 15% Recovery Code Costs You

Some stores put a discount code in the reminder. It can win back a sale, but you'll also make less profit on every order that uses it.

Example: an $80 cart and a 15% code

Say your average abandoned cart is $80 and your gross margin is 50%. A full-price order leaves you $40 of gross profit. With a 15% code, the shopper pays $68 and you keep $28.

Now suppose the reminder brings back 50 orders, and 20 of those shoppers would've come back and paid full price anyway.

30 real wins: 30 x $28 = $840 of new gross profit.
20 you'd have had anyway: 20 x $12 = $240 given away.
Net gain: $840 - $240 = $600.

Your recovery report would show 50 orders and $3,400 in sales (50 x $68). The gross profit the reminder actually added? $600.

"Recovered" Doesn't Mean "Extra"

The common mistake is counting every recovered order as a sale you'd otherwise have lost. Email tools usually credit the reminder for any order placed within a set window after it goes out. They can't tell who'd have come back on their own. So that credit comes from a revenue attribution gap. It doesn't prove the reminder worked.

Want a clean answer? Skip reminders for a random group of carts and compare the two groups, like an A/B test.

When Recovery Doesn't Pay

Thin margins. On a $100 item with a 20% margin, a 15% code leaves you $5 of gross profit.
Shoppers who learn the pattern. If every left cart gets a code, some buyers may start leaving carts on purpose. That's one kind of discount fatigue.
Reasons a message can't fix. If someone left over a missing payment option or a slow delivery date, a friendlier email won't change that.

Catching Shoppers Before They Leave

Recovery doesn't replace prevention, though. Our app, Growth Suite, works while the shopper's still in your store. It reads behavior like cart activity to predict purchase intent. Only visitors it rates as less likely to buy see a time-limited offer, and you can also target cart abandoners and return visitors.

Our guide to cart recovery vs. prevention shows how the two fit together. If you're planning when each reminder goes out, check the abandoned cart email timing guide. Picking a tool? Here's our list of the best cart abandonment apps for Shopify.

Related Terms

Cart Abandonment: adding items to a cart and leaving with no order.
Checkout Abandonment: leaving after checkout has started, before paying.
Cart Abandonment Flow: the automated series of reminders sent after a cart is left.
Browse Abandonment: looking at products and leaving with an empty cart.
Single-Use Code: a code that works for one order only, so a leaked copy stops working.