Win Back Abandoned Carts

Two items in the cart, address filled in, shipping cost appeared, window closed. Three reminders go out after that, all with the same line: “you forgot something.” Except your contact forgot nothing. They stopped, and they know exactly why. That this is the norm rather than the exception shows in the Baymard Institute’s review of 49 studies: 70.19 percent of all carts on average never turn into orders.

Those abandoners are the most expensive contacts you have. Ad paid for, click paid for, products chosen, address typed. And the maths gets worse every year: Contentsquare analysed 90 billion sessions across 6,000 websites and found the cost per website visit rose 9 percent in 2024 and 19 percent over two years, while the conversion rate fell 6.1 percent in the same period. Getting a new visitor to that same point costs you more than reaching the one who was already standing there.

That is why an abandoner is addressed differently from a new prospect. A new prospect still has to work out what you offer and whether it suits them. The abandoner is past all of that, they even picked specific items. What is left is one single point where things stopped. So the first message does not repeat your offer, it asks about that point in one sentence, with three options to tap. What comes next depends on the answer: the cost question needs different words from a doubt about the product, and different ones again from a payment step that failed.

The reflex here is a discount code, and it is the most expensive answer of them all. Baymard also asked about the reasons: 40 percent abandon because the extra costs are too high, 20 percent because delivery takes too long, 19 percent over security concerns about paying by card, 18 percent because they were asked to create an account first. A discount answers exactly one of those, and often the wrong version of it, because the product price was never the problem, the surcharge at the end was. For everyone else you give away margin to people who would have ordered anyway, and you teach your repeat buyers that abandoning is a way to negotiate. Ask instead and you learn the reason, you can clear it, and after thirty abandonments you know where your checkout is stuck.

What decides whether the whole sequence helps or hurts is a return signal: your shop reporting that an order came in. Without it, the second reminder reaches people who bought long ago, and a helpful question turns into a message that makes them doubt your shop. The blueprint draws that point in as its own node and ends the sequence there. Which tool handles the sending on your side changes nothing about that, the order of the questions and the place where the check happens are what make the difference.