How Do I Track Abandoned Carts?

Somewhere between 65% and 80% of shopping carts get abandoned — the customer adds items, gets to checkout, and then just disappears. Abandoned cart recovery is one of the highest-ROI things you can do in e-commerce because you're not acquiring a new customer; you're reminding someone who already liked what they saw. VeloCMS automates the whole sequence so you configure it once and let it run.

How a cart becomes 'abandoned'

VeloCMS considers a cart abandoned when it's been inactive for at least one hour and no order was created from it. 'Inactive' means no item additions, no removals, and no checkout initiated during that window. The cart also needs an email address attached — either because the customer started the checkout flow and entered their email, or because they're a logged-in member whose email is already known. Anonymous carts with no email attached can't receive recovery emails (there's nowhere to send them).

Turning on cart recovery

Admin → Shop → Cart Recovery → turn on the 'Enable cart recovery emails' toggle. That's the master switch. Once enabled, the drip sequence starts automatically for any cart that hits the one-hour inactivity threshold while the toggle is on. Pre-existing abandoned carts from before you turned it on won't retroactively receive emails — the drip applies to carts abandoned after activation.

The three-email drip sequence

The default sequence sends three emails at increasing time intervals. The first goes out one hour after abandonment — a friendly, no-pressure reminder listing the cart contents with product images, prices, and a single large button back to checkout. The cart link is a one-click restore: clicking it takes the customer straight to a pre-populated checkout with their items still in the basket. They don't re-add anything.

The second email fires 24 hours after abandonment. It's a bit more specific — if any cart items have limited inventory, this email mentions it with a soft urgency note ('Only 3 left in your size'). No artificial scarcity: VeloCMS pulls the real stock number from your inventory, so this line only appears when the variant actually has limited stock. You can customize the subject line and body copy for this email from the Cart Recovery settings page.

The third email comes at 72 hours and is where you can sweeten the deal. In Admin → Shop → Cart Recovery → Coupon, you can attach an auto-generated discount code that's included in this final email. The coupon is single-use, tied to that customer's email, and expires after 48 hours from when the email was sent. If you don't attach a coupon, the third email is just a final reminder without the incentive — still worth sending, but converts at a lower rate.

Customizing email content

Each of the three email templates has editable subject lines and a body intro paragraph. The cart contents section (product list, images, prices, checkout button) is generated automatically and can't be removed — it's the whole point of the email. What you can customize is the framing around it: the tone, whether you add a personal note, what the subject line says. Keep subjects under 50 characters for mobile preview and avoid words like 'forgot' in the first email — they convert worse than simple 'Your cart is saved' phrasing.

Reading the recovery dashboard

Admin → Shop → Cart Recovery shows a summary dashboard with total abandoned carts, total recovered carts, recovery rate, and revenue attributed to recovery emails for any date range you pick. A cart counts as 'recovered' when the customer clicks through from a recovery email and completes a purchase within 7 days — this window is configurable in Cart Recovery Settings if you want to widen or narrow the attribution. The dashboard also shows which email in the sequence drove the conversion, so you can see whether it's mostly the hour-one nudge, the 24-hour stock alert, or the 72-hour coupon doing the heavy lifting.