What Is Abandoned Cart Recovery and How Does It Work?
Abandoned cart recovery saves each shopper's cart at checkout and is designed to email those who left without paying, but the drip is not switched on yet.
Abandoned cart recovery is a drip of up to three emails to shoppers who entered their email at checkout but never paid. The cart itself is saved per customer, so a shopper who comes back finds their items still in it. One important caveat: the recovery job is built but not switched on yet, so no recovery emails are being sent today. The rest of this article describes the mechanism as implemented, so you know what to expect when it goes live.
When does VeloCMS consider a cart abandoned?
A cart enters the recovery pipeline when the customer types their email address during checkout and then leaves without paying. Only customers who ticked the marketing-consent box at checkout are ever emailed — carts without consent are skipped entirely, and anonymous carts (no email entered) can't be recovered because there's nobody to write to.
What do the three emails look like and when are they sent?
The sequence is fixed: a first reminder one hour after abandonment, a second at 24 hours, and a third at 72 hours. Each email lists the cart items and links back to your store. The templates are built into VeloCMS and translated automatically — there are no subject-line or body editors, and no coupon is attached to any of the three emails.
The marketing-consent checkbox at checkout is the only switch: customers who don't opt in are never sent recovery emails. There are no per-email settings to turn individual emails in the sequence on or off.
How does the unsubscribe work?
Every cart recovery email includes a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer. The link is HMAC-signed so it can't be forged — clicking it marks that customer's email as opted-out of cart recovery emails and no further recovery sequence fires for them. This is separate from your newsletter unsubscribe list; opting out of cart recovery emails doesn't affect newsletter delivery or vice versa.
How do I measure whether it's actually working?
There is no cart-recovery dashboard in VeloCMS today — no recovery-rate or attributed-revenue reporting, and no attribution-window setting. If you want to gauge interest before the job goes live, your store's order list is the ground truth.