Recovering abandoned checkouts

Note

If you opted in or want to opt in to the new abandoned checkout experience, then you can learn more about the new experience.

Items in a customers cart at the time that they abandoned the checkout aren't saved.

Abandoned checkout recovery is available only for the Online Store sales channel, the Buy Button sales channel, and the Plus Wholesale Channel. Abandoned checkouts on Shopify POS or third-party sales channels won't receive a checkout recovery email.

Tip

Discount codes and security badges are some of the ways that you can keep customers from abandoning their carts.

Review your abandoned checkouts

You can review your abandoned checkouts to find patterns that might suggest why your customers aren't completing orders.

Abandoned checkouts are saved in the Shopify admin for three months. Every Monday, abandoned checkouts that are older than three months are removed from your admin.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.

2. Click Abandoned checkouts.

Tip

You can export abandoned checkouts when you export your orders.

View payment events from an abandoned checkout

Each time a customer tries to pay for their order, a payment event is noted in the Timeline of the abandoned checkout. You can expand payment events for more details.

Payment events can be helpful if a customer is trying to place an order and their payment fails. If a customer contacts you because their payment doesn't work at checkout, then you can view the details of the payment event, and use the information to help your customer.

If your customer successfully paid at checkout, then instead go to the order's timeline to view payment events.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders > Abandoned checkouts.

2. Click an abandoned checkout.

3. On the abandoned checkout details page, go to Timeline.

4. Click a payment event.

Automatically email a customer a link to their abandoned checkout

Grow your business

Want to have more control and design flexibility over your abandoned checkout emails? Consider activating the new abandoned checkouts automation in the Marketing section in your Shopify admin.

You can automatically send an email to customers after they have abandoned their checkout. Each email contains a link to the customer's abandoned cart, allowing them to complete their checkout if they choose. You can edit the email template by adding a logo or changing the color scheme.

A recovery email is not sent for an abandoned checkout in the following circumstances:

• If a potential customer creates one or more abandoned checkouts and then completes a sale before the recovery email gets sent, then the email won't be sent.
• If a payment processing error occurred when the customer tried to complete their checkout, then the email won't be sent.
• If your shop does not support shipping to the customer's address, then the email won't be sent.
• If you allow customers to enter a phone number instead of an email address at checkout, and the customer chooses to enter a phone number, then the email can't be sent.
• If none of the products in the checkout are available for purchase (empty inventory, for example), then the email won't be sent.
• If all the products in the checkout are free, and the customer does not visit the shipping page to add a shipping fee or the shipping fee is also free, then the email won't be sent.

If you have configured your shop to automatically send recovery emails, then the Abandoned checkouts page will contain tooltips explaining why recovery emails were not delivered.

Steps:

Desktop

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
2. In the Abandoned checkouts section, check Automatically send abandoned checkout emails.
3. Under Send to, choose who you want to send a checkout recovery email to:
   • Anyone who abandons a checkout
   • Email subscribers who abandon a checkout
4. Under Send after, select the number of hours that Shopify should wait before sending the abandoned checkout email:
   • Never. You can still manually send an email to customers.
   • 1 hour later
   • 6 hours later
   • 10 hours later (default)
   • 24 hours later
5. Click Save.

Tip

Why are these time intervals the only options? We reviewed how often people completed orders on their own after abandoning a checkout and found that customers are most likely to return and check out after one of these amounts of time, especially 1 hour later or 10 hours later. We chose these times to maximize the number of recovered checkouts for your store.

You can review the status of each abandoned order email by going to Orders and then clicking Abandoned checkouts. The status of each recovery email is found under the Email status column. The status of the abandoned checkout can be found under Recovery status.

After an email is sent, the checkout is considered recovered after the customer completes the order. A customer can either click the recovery link in the email or complete the checkout on their own.

Tip

A great way to entice customers to complete their checkout is to offer them a discount.

Manually email a customer a link to their abandoned checkout

You can choose to manually send an abandoned checkout email to a customer. The email contains a link to the customer's abandoned cart, allowing them to complete their checkout. You might want to send the abandoned checkout email manually when you haven't set up the automation, or when your customer requests the abandoned checkout link.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Orders > Abandoned checkouts.
2. Click the number of the abandoned checkout that you want to recover.
3. Click the customer’s email under the customer information.

Your email client launches with the abandoned checkout template in the email body.

If the customer completes their order using that link, then the Recovery status on the Abandoned checkout page updates to display as recovered.

Abandoned checkouts email report

The Abandoned checkouts emails report by Shopify helps you better understand how effective those emails are at bringing your customers back to finish a transaction. It's available in the Marketing section of Shopify.

The report tells you how many sessions and completed orders have resulted from the reminder emails. You can also review information like conversion rates, total amount of sales, average order value, average number of products sold, and how many customers were first-time customers.

The report displays data only from November 18, 2019 onwards.