Guide
Shopify Abandoned Cart Recovery: Complete Setup Guide (2026)
Turn on Shopify's native recovery email in ten minutes, add a Klaviyo sequence on top, and know exactly what native recovery cannot do.
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Shopify abandoned cart recovery is built in: anyone who entered contact details at checkout and left gets an email with a link that restores their cart, and switching it on takes ten minutes. It cannot reach carts that never got to checkout, text, call, or answer the question that stopped the buyer. Setup first, then the layers.
What Shopify recovers on its own
First, the difference between an abandoned cart and an abandoned checkout, because Shopify only sees one of them.
An abandoned checkout exists once a shopper has reached checkout and entered contact details on the first step, an email or a phone number. From that moment Shopify has a record: the line items, the contact, the step they reached, and a recovery link that reopens the checkout with everything restored. This is what the native email sends to.
An abandoned cart is everything before that. Someone added to cart and closed the tab. Unless they were logged in to a customer account (in which case the cart is tied to their profile and reachable through your email platform or a cart-recovery app), Shopify has no contact to send anything to. Baymard Institute's long-running average puts abandonment at roughly 70%, and a good share of that never reaches the contact step. Shopify customer accounts and on-site capture are how you grow the part native recovery can see.
What the native automation does with an abandoned checkout is simple: one email, on a delay you pick, in your store's branding, with a button back to the checkout. No sequence, no SMS, no reply handling. For many stores that single email is the cheapest recovery they will ever run, which is why it goes on first.
Step-by-step: turn on Shopify abandoned cart recovery
Open the automation. In Shopify admin, go to Marketing, then Automations, and pick the "Recover abandoned checkout" template. On older stores this lived under Settings, then Checkout.
Choose the delay. Shopify offers a fixed set of delays from one hour up to 24 hours. Pick one hour for most stores. Sooner interrupts people still deciding, later lets the intent cool.
Customise the email. Rewrite the subject line and body in your voice, keep it under 90 words, name the product, and make sure the reply-to address is one someone reads. The abandoned cart email examples post has 15 you can adapt. No discount code in this email.
Test it with a real abandoned checkout. Use a personal email, add a product, enter your details at checkout, close the tab, and wait for the delay. Open the email on a phone, tap the button, and confirm the checkout reopens with the cart and address intact. Then turn the automation on.
Where abandoned checkouts live and what to look at
In Shopify admin, go to Orders, then Abandoned checkouts. Each row is one abandoned checkout with the customer, the items, the value, when it happened, and a recovery status showing whether the email was sent and whether the checkout was later completed. Opening a row gives you the recovery link, which you can paste into a manual email or DM for a cart worth chasing personally.
Three things are worth reading off this list every week:
Which products get abandoned most. If one SKU dominates, the problem is on that product page (price, shipping surprise, missing size info), not in your email copy.
What step people stop at. A drop at shipping means a shipping-cost objection. A drop at payment means declined cards or a missing payment method. Each needs a different message.
How many have a phone number. That is your ceiling for SMS and call recovery. If it is low, add the SMS consent capture at checkout before you buy any texting tool.
The recovery status column is also your only native measure of whether the email works. Track recovered checkouts as a share of emailed checkouts, monthly, and treat that as your baseline before adding anything else.
Adding Klaviyo or Shopify Email flows
Once the single native email is running and measured, the next layer is a sequence. Two ways to build it.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo reads Shopify's abandoned checkouts as a Started Checkout event. In your flow builder, create a flow on that trigger with a Placed Order filter so buyers drop out, then build the three-email sequence: a reminder at about 1 hour, an objection or proof email at about 24 hours, and an offer or close at about 72 hours. Do not discount in email one. If you collect SMS consent at checkout, add a conditional split on consent and an SMS step at about 30 minutes or 4 hours, following the timing in our abandoned cart SMS guide.
Then switch off Shopify's native recovery email. Running both means two reminders an hour apart, and it corrupts your measurement of either.
Shopify Email
If you would rather stay inside Shopify, the same Marketing, then Automations area lets you build a multi-step version of the abandoned checkout template with Shopify Email, with delays between steps. Less flexible than Klaviyo on segmentation and no SMS, but for a store without a Klaviyo contract it covers the three-email sequence at no extra cost.
Either way
Restrict any discount code to first orders, single-use, with a real expiry, set up in Shopify Discounts.
Add UTM parameters to every recovery link so the order is attributed to the flow. Our conversion attribution guide covers how that shows up in Shopify and GA4.
Keep one flow per channel. One email sequence, one SMS sequence, one owner.
What native Shopify recovery can't do
Native recovery, and even a full Klaviyo sequence on top of it, stops at the same four walls.
No phone calls. There is no native way to ring the customer.
No two-way replies. The recovery email goes out from your store address. A reply with a question lands in a mailbox that is usually nobody's job.
Nothing for carts without contact details. The shopper who never reached the contact step gets nothing, and that is the majority of abandoners on most stores.
No answer to the question that stopped the buyer. The email can remind. It cannot find out that the customer was unsure the size would fit, or whether it ships to them, and it cannot answer.
The layer that handles those is a call plus a text on the same event, and the mechanics are on our abandoned cart recovery page. In short: your CRM (Klaviyo, Customer.io, or anything that can post JSON) sends the abandon or failed-payment event by webhook the moment it happens, an AI voice agent calls promptly in your brand's name, answers questions and gives the code, leaves a voicemail with the code if nobody picks up, and a text with the cart link follows from a number registered to your brand, with replies handled by the same agent. One telehealth brand running Exerta on several treatment lines sees 3.4% recovery on carts where nobody was reached (its own emails and ads doing their normal work), 4.9% after a voicemail with the code, and 10.2% after a live conversation, three times the baseline. Overall it recovers 6% of the carts it sends, a 32% lift over its own baseline, with more than 450 carts a month recovered right after the person was reached.
None of that replaces the native email. It sits on top, for carts with a phone number and consent, which is why the consent capture in the checklist matters.
Checklist before you switch anything on
Only one system sends the abandoned checkout email. Native or Klaviyo, not both.
Delay is set to one hour on the first send.
Reply-to on every recovery email is a monitored inbox.
The recovery link has been tested on a phone and reopens the checkout with items and address restored.
Any discount code is single-use, first orders only, with a real expiry, and never in email one.
The SMS marketing opt-in at checkout is on, unticked by default, with a clear disclosure next to the phone field. Marketing texts and AI voice calls to US numbers need prior express written consent under the TCPA, so no consent means no text and no call. Not legal advice, confirm with counsel.
Quiet hours are set in your SMS tool to the strictest state you sell into, not just the federal 8am to 9pm window.
Your sending number is registered through 10DLC before the first marketing text goes out.
Recovery links carry UTM parameters and you know where recovered orders appear in reporting.
Buyers exit every flow the moment an order is placed, and anyone who got the sequence in the last 30 days is suppressed.
You have a baseline: recovered checkouts as a share of emailed checkouts for the last full month, before any new layer goes live.
FAQ
Does Shopify send abandoned cart emails automatically?
Yes, once the "Recover abandoned checkout" automation is switched on under Marketing, then Automations. It sends one email, after the delay you choose, to anyone who entered contact details at checkout and did not complete the order. No app is required. It does not send a sequence and it does not send SMS.
What is the difference between an abandoned cart and an abandoned checkout in Shopify?
An abandoned checkout is a cart where the shopper reached checkout and entered an email or phone number, so Shopify has a contact and a recovery link. An abandoned cart is anything before that step. Native recovery only reaches abandoned checkouts, and carts without contact details need customer accounts or an app to capture.
Should I use Shopify's native email or a Klaviyo flow?
One or the other, never both. Start with native if you have nothing running, measure it for a month, then move to Klaviyo when you want a three-email sequence, segmentation and an SMS step. When you switch, turn the native automation off the same day so nobody receives two reminders.
Can Shopify send abandoned cart text messages natively?
No. Shopify's own recovery automation is email only. What Shopify provides natively is the SMS marketing opt-in at checkout, and that consent flag flows to whichever SMS platform you connect (Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive). The text itself is sent by that platform on the Started Checkout trigger, inside quiet hours.
Does the Shopify abandoned cart email need a discount to work?
No. A reminder with the product named, a working recovery link and a reply-to someone reads recovers orders on its own. A code in the first email mainly costs margin on customers who would have come back anyway. If you offer one, hold it for the third email and restrict it to first orders.
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Get started today
Switch on the native email today, measure it for a month, then add the layers. When you are ready for the carts that need a call, see how AI abandoned cart recovery plugs into the same Shopify and Klaviyo events you already have. Book a demo and we will quote the cart-recovery line for your store.
