AddThisFeature

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Bring back shoppers who left items behind, with a link that restores what they had.

involved Growth

What it adds

A short reminder sequence triggered by an inactive cart with a captured email, carrying a link that rebuilds the cart.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Define abandonment as a cart with contents, a known email address, and no activity for a set period. Schedule the first reminder from the last activity timestamp, not from when the cart was created.

  2. 2

    Keep the sequence short and stop it at the first sign of return. Two messages is usually the whole feature; the third mostly generates unsubscribes.

  3. 3

    Give each reminder a signed, single-cart, expiring link that reconstructs the cart from the stored line items and drops the shopper onto the cart page, not the homepage.

  4. 4

    Send through the app's existing transactional email path and honour the Email Preference Center. A recovery reminder is marketing, so it belongs to the marketing preference and the existing unsubscribe, not to a new one.

  5. 5

    Do not send to an address the shopper merely typed into a checkout field and abandoned without a consent basis. Capture consent explicitly and record where and when it was given, because an unconsented reminder is a legal problem, not a growth tactic.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • The sequence must stop the moment the order is placed by any route, including a different device, a phone order, or a second cart. Check order state at send time as well as at schedule time, because a reminder queued an hour ago may already be wrong.
  • An address with no captured consent basis must never be emailed. Store the consent record alongside the address, and treat a missing record as a refusal rather than a default yes.
  • Restore links must expire and must refuse to load if the cart has since been claimed by a different account. A forwarded link that hands over someone else's cart exposes what they were buying and where they were shipping it.
  • A shopper who abandons carts every week is browsing, not hesitating. Suppress the sequence for repeat abandoners and enforce a frequency cap so nobody receives more than one recovery message in a defined window.
  • By the time the link is opened, items may be unavailable or repriced. Rebuild what is still purchasable, show clearly what changed or dropped out, and never restore a cart at the old price.
  • A cart abandoned at the payment step and one abandoned after adding a single item are different situations, and sending the same message to both wastes the more valuable one.
  • Every message needs a working unsubscribe that suppresses future recovery sends immediately, and unsubscribing must not also stop order confirmations.
  • Sends must be idempotent. A retried background job must not produce a second copy of the same reminder.

Definition of done

9
  • Reminders send only to addresses with a recorded consent basis.
  • The sequence stops immediately once an order is placed by any route, checked at send time.
  • Restore links are signed, expiring, and refused when the cart has changed owner.
  • A restored cart reflects current prices and availability and names what changed.
  • A frequency cap and repeat-abandoner suppression are enforced.
  • Messages go through the existing email path and honour the existing preference center and unsubscribe.
  • Retried jobs do not produce duplicate sends.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.