Someone found your shop, chose something, went to pay, and stopped. That is the closest anyone comes to buying without buying, and it is worth more of your attention than any amount of new traffic.
It is also mostly not a mystery. Abandoned checkouts are usually caused by something specific and fixable, and the fixes cost nothing.
First, fix the checkout. Then recover the rest.
Recovery emails are the second line. If a quarter of your buyers are leaving because delivery costs appear at the last step, an email that says "you left something behind" is politely reminding them of the reason they left.
Work through these first:
- Show delivery cost before the last step. The single most common reason people abandon. A number that appears after they have entered their address feels like a trick, even when it is perfectly reasonable.
- Do not force an account. Nobody wants a password to buy one thing. Let them check out as a guest and offer the account afterwards, when it is a convenience rather than a toll.
- Cut the fields. Every optional field is a small invitation to give up. If you do not need a company name or a second phone number, do not ask for one.
- Show the payment methods early. Someone who only pays one way needs to know their way is there before they invest five minutes.
- Say what happens if it goes wrong. Your returns policy belongs near the buy button, not only in the footer. That is the doubt being resolved at that exact moment, which is the argument in Returns and Reviews.
Not everyone who abandons was ever going to buy
Worth saying plainly, because it keeps you sane: a good share of abandoned checkouts are people comparing prices, saving something for later, or checking your delivery cost against someone else's. They were never a lost sale. You cannot recover them and it is not a failure that you did not.
What you are aiming at is the smaller group who genuinely meant to buy and got interrupted - the phone rang, the train arrived, the card was in another room. Those people are recoverable, and they are the reason the reminder works at all.
The reminder email, and its timing
The mechanics that matter are the timing and the link.
Send the first one about an hour later. Long enough that they are not being watched, short enough that the decision is still warm. Send one follow-up the next day if the order is still unpaid, and then stop. A third email is not persistence, it is a reason to unsubscribe.
The link must restore the cart. Sending someone back to an empty shop and asking them to rebuild their basket from memory is worse than not emailing. The whole value is that they land back exactly where they were, one click from finishing.
In Webkio this runs on its own: a checkout that is started and never paid leaves the order pending, and the reminders go out automatically - one about an hour after, a second about a day later, and nothing after seven days. The link restores the basket. Honest caveat: abandoned-cart recovery is included on the Growth Business and Agency plans, not on Free or Starter, so check the pricing page against the plan you are on.
Do not lead with a discount
The tempting version of this email offers 10% off. Resist it for one practical reason: customers learn. If abandoning reliably produces a discount code, you have taught your best customers to abandon on purpose, and you will pay that tax on orders that were never at risk.
Start with a plain reminder. If you want to use an incentive, hold it for the second email, keep it modest, and treat it as a test rather than a policy - watch whether total revenue moves, not whether the recovery rate does.
What to measure
You do not need a dashboard for this. Two numbers, monthly:
- Pending orders that never became paid. That is the size of the problem.
- How many pending orders became paid after a reminder. That is what recovery is worth.
If the first number is large and the second barely moves, your problem is in the checkout, not in the email - go back to the top of this article. Order states are visible in the dashboard; Shop orders covers what each one means.
The order this actually happens in
Fix the checkout, then turn on recovery, then consider an incentive. Doing it backwards - discounting first - hides the real problem behind a cost you keep paying.
If you are still setting the shop up, Set up your shop and Shop payments cover the plumbing, and How to Open an Online Store covers the wider picture. If you are weighing whether to sell on your own site at all, the online store builder page lays out what that involves.
FAQ
How many recovery emails should I send?
Two. One about an hour after the checkout is abandoned, one the next day. A third rarely recovers anything and mostly teaches people to ignore your emails.
Should the first email include a discount?
No. A good number of those carts were going to be completed anyway, and discounting them costs you margin on sales you already had. Keep the discount in reserve for the second email, if at all.
Is a high abandonment rate always a problem?
Not on its own. Some of it is normal browsing behaviour. It becomes a problem when the rate moves suddenly, which usually points at something breaking in the checkout rather than a change in your customers.