Recovering abandoned checkouts
Most people who reach your checkout do not finish it. When a customer leaves without paying, abandoned-checkout recovery emails them a link back to the cart they left, with everything still in it.
If you are here because a customer added items, started to pay and then disappeared, this is the page you want.
What counts as abandoned
A checkout that was started but never paid for leaves an order sitting in pending. You can see them on Sales analytics as the Pending figure, next to your paid orders.
Nothing is lost when this happens. The cart contents are held against that pending order, which is what makes the return link work.
The two emails
There are two, and they stop on their own:
- About an hour after the checkout is abandoned.
- About 23 hours after the first one, and only if the order is still unpaid.
After that, nothing further is sent. The order is given up on entirely after 7 days and retired, which also releases anything it was holding, such as a gift-card balance or a coupon use.
The gap is deliberate. An hour catches the people who were interrupted, and the next day catches the people who were thinking about it. Sending more than that trains people to ignore you.
The return link
Each email contains a link that restores the cart exactly as it was left. The shopper does not have to find the products again, which is the single biggest reason recovery emails work at all.
The link is tied to that one checkout and is not a general login.
Switching it on
Recovery sending is part of the Growth Business and Agency plans. On other plans the reminders are simply not sent.
Worth knowing if you are upgrading: nothing is burned through while you are on a plan without it. A checkout abandoned before you upgrade can still be picked up afterwards, as long as it is still inside the window above and still unpaid.
If the emails are not going out
Check the email log first and search for the customer's address. That tells you whether a reminder was generated at all, which separates "not sending" from "sent but landed in spam".