How Do I Track Abandoned Carts?
How VeloCMS captures abandoned carts at checkout, the three-email recovery sequence built into the platform, and its current rollout status.
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 captures these carts automatically at checkout and has a three-email recovery sequence built in — with one important caveat about its current status, covered below.
How a cart becomes 'abandoned'
A cart is captured the moment a customer enters their email address during checkout — from then on, the cart's contents are stored against that email. The recovery sequence only ever emails customers who explicitly opted into marketing emails at checkout (the consent checkbox); carts without that opt-in are stored but never emailed, so only customers who opted in are emailed. Anonymous carts with no email attached can't be recovered at all — there's nowhere to send the reminder.
Current status — captured, not yet sending
Cart capture is live today: every checkout that reaches the email step stores a recoverable cart. The sending side — a scheduled job that runs the drip hourly — is built and deployed but currently switched off platform-wide while the scheduled-jobs system is finalized. That means no recovery emails go out yet, and there is no per-tenant toggle to flip. When the job is switched on, the sequence below starts applying to newly abandoned carts.
The three-email drip sequence
The sequence sends up to three emails at increasing intervals: one hour after the cart goes idle ('You left something behind'), again at 24 hours ('Still interested? Your cart is waiting'), and a final nudge at 72 hours ('Last chance — complete your order'). Each email lists the cart contents with prices and a button back to a pre-populated checkout — the customer doesn't re-add anything. Emails go out in your site's language and always include an unsubscribe link.
Only one email is sent per cart per run, and each stage is tracked so a customer never receives the same stage twice. The sequence stops as soon as the customer completes a purchase — a completed checkout clears their stored cart, so the remaining stages simply have nothing to send against.
Two things the sequence does not do today: it never invents urgency (no 'only 3 left' stock lines), and there is no coupon attached to the final email — the 72-hour message is a plain last-chance reminder. If you want a discount in the loop, the current workaround is a site-wide coupon you mention in your own follow-up.
The drip is strictly opt-in. A customer who leaves the marketing checkbox unticked at checkout will never receive a recovery email — their cart is stored for their own returning session, but no email is sent.
Customizing email content
The three templates are built into the platform today — fixed subject lines, your store's branding, and an automatically generated cart section. There is no per-template editor yet, so the lever you have is the checkout experience itself: capture the email early in the flow and the recovery sequence has something to work with.
Measuring recovery
There is no recovery-rate dashboard today. Once the drip is switched on, the practical way to gauge its effect is your Admin → Orders list: a completed order that was preceded by an abandoned cart is a recovery. A dedicated dashboard with per-stage conversion is on the roadmap alongside the job switch-on.