Abandoned carts

How to recover abandoned carts: SMS, email and calls that bring orders back

A shopper who has started the checkout has already chosen what to buy. If they stop there, the reason is usually something around the product, such as the delivery cost, the courier or the payment method, or a simple interruption. Here is what happens in those minutes and how to bring the shopper back to exactly where they stopped.

The RevOrder team Published 1 November 2026 8 min read

In short

An abandoned cart is a customer who has already decided what they want. They need an easy way back, not more persuasion.
Send the first reminder while they still remember the store: within about an hour, not the next day, and never in the middle of the night.
Choose the channel from the contact you actually have. A phone number means SMS or a call, an email address means email, and not every shopper leaves both.
Match every order to the message that came before it, and count orders, not clicks. Otherwise you pay for every channel without knowing which one brings orders back.

Why shoppers stop in the middle of the checkout

The shopper has picked a product, opened the cart and started filling in their details. At this point they are not doubting the product. They are doubting something around it: the delivery cost appears only now, their courier is not on the list, the address form asks for things they do not know by heart, or the phone rings and the tab stays open.

This matters because it decides what you should do next. You are not selling the product again. You remove the reason for the interruption and bring the person back to the same place, with the same cart, without making them fill everything in again.

A delivery cost or delivery time they did not expect.
A missing payment method or courier. In markets such as Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, the missing method is often cash on delivery.
No way to pick a courier office or parcel locker, so the shopper has to type out a full address.
A checkout that demands an account or asks for too many fields.
A plain interruption: a phone call, a child, a lost connection, a browser tab closed on the phone.

When to send the first reminder

There is a window in which the shopper still remembers what they wanted, and it is short. A first message 30 to 60 minutes after the interruption lands inside it: if the message names the store and the product, the shopper remembers why they were there.

A message the next morning is already an advert. It can still work, but it competes with everything else in the inbox and the chat apps, not with the shopper's memory. A sensible sequence therefore looks like this: a first reminder within the hour, a second one the next day with a different angle (the delivery time or the stock level, for example), and a third attempt only if the cart is worth a phone call.

Two more things decide whether and when a reminder arrives. The night: a cart left at 11 pm should not get a text at midnight, so RevOrder holds cart reminders between 21:00 and 09:00 in the shop's local time by default and sends them in the morning. And the purchase: RevOrder's ready-made sequence (an SMS 30 minutes after the cart is marked abandoned, an email a day later) checks for an order right before each send and stops as soon as it finds one.

When your baskets are large, a phone call can be worth more than a third message: a person can answer the question that stopped the customer and take the order there and then. In RevOrder, calls about abandoned carts are made by the call center, which you switch on separately from the messages. You can hold the calls back so that your SMS gets the first chance, and customers who have already ordered drop out of the queue. The operator sees what was in the cart and can turn it into an order during the call.

Which channel for which customer

The channel is not a matter of taste but of data. If the shopper reached the phone field, you have a number and can send an SMS. If they only got as far as the email field, you have an email address. The automation should use what is actually available for each customer rather than fire on every channel at once.

SMS works on any phone and needs no app. Keep it short and to one message: Cyrillic, Greek and many accented letters switch an SMS to Unicode, where a single message holds 70 characters instead of 160.
Email has room for product photos, the full cart and the delivery details. People tend to read it later, which makes it a good fit for the second reminder the next day.
Viber fits markets where customers already use it every day. It reaches only people who have the app, so treat it as an extra attempt next to SMS, not as a replacement for it.

In RevOrder, SMS, email and Viber steps sit in one automation for abandoned carts. SMS and Viber check the same opt-out list, so a number that has opted out of your texts gets no Viber messages either, while email keeps its own unsubscribe list. Viber messages are plain text with a link, without images or buttons; for now they go to Bulgarian numbers only and are available on request.

What to write in the message

A common mistake is a discount in the first message. It teaches customers to abandon carts on purpose to get a code. The first reminder should be exactly that, a reminder: the store's name, the product, a link back to the cart and, if the interruption was about delivery, the answer to the question that stopped the shopper.

First message: "Your cart at [store] is waiting. Finish your order here: [link]". Nothing more.
Second message: one concrete reason to finish now, such as the delivery time, the last items in stock, or free delivery above a certain amount if you offer it.
Third message or a call: only for higher-value carts. This is where a small discount makes sense, because you have already tried without one.

The link should lead back to the same cart, ideally with the details already filled in. If the shopper lands on an empty cart or on the home page, you have lost them a second time. In RevOrder each link is personal to one cart and takes the shopper back to it, normally on your own store's domain. On another device, such as the phone that received the SMS, how fully the cart is rebuilt depends on your store's platform and, on WooCommerce, on the plugin version.

Not sure about the wording? Test it on your own customers: one variant of RevOrder's ready-made sequence splits the first SMS 50/50 between two texts.

How to tell which channel brings orders back

If every message points to the same address and nothing else ties an order to a message, all you know at the end of the month is that something brought orders back. Each order has to be matched to the message that came before it, either through a separate link in each message or through the customer's phone number or email address, so that it can be credited to the channel and to the step of the sequence.

Only then can you answer the questions that decide your costs. Is it the SMS or the email that brings orders back? Is the second message worth sending? Do calls pay for themselves at your basket size?

RevOrder counts an order as recovered when it comes within 72 hours of a recovery message and can be matched to the person who received it. The order is credited to the channel of the last message before it, and a click on the link is recorded as evidence, not as a result. The dashboard shows recovered orders and their value for SMS, email, Viber and calls separately, next to what the messages cost.

For orientation, this is the aggregate RevOrder publishes: across 25 merchants over 90 days (July to October 2026), 8.6% of abandoned carts that received a recovery SMS turned into an order within 72 hours, and well-configured automations reached 10–14%. Roughly one in three call center calls to a customer with an abandoned order ended in an order, and the recovered orders were worth about 12 times what the SMS and calls cost.

These figures count orders placed within 72 hours of a contact and vary with the niche, the country and how the sequence is set up. They describe a group of stores, not a forecast for yours, which is why the dashboard reports your own numbers channel by channel.

What to fix in the checkout so fewer carts are abandoned

The cheapest abandoned cart is the one that never happens. Three fixes remove common reasons to stop: show the delivery cost before the checkout, let the shopper pick a courier office or locker from a list instead of typing an address, and offer cash on delivery where customers expect it. On WooCommerce, for example, the RevOrder plugin puts the choice of courier, office and locker inside the checkout itself.

For a cash-on-delivery store, recovery is not the last step. A recovered cart becomes an order, but the sale is complete only when the customer accepts the parcel at the door, so the next step is confirming the order before it ships.

The recovery automation is the net under the tightrope. The checkout is the rope itself.

Questions about abandoned carts

How soon should I send the first abandoned cart reminder?

Within about an hour. After that, the shopper no longer remembers why they were in your store, and your message competes with everything else on their phone rather than with their memory. The one exception is the night: hold reminders until the morning instead of texting at midnight.

Should the reminder include a discount?

Not the first one. A discount in the first message teaches customers to abandon carts on purpose. If you use one at all, keep it for the third attempt and for higher-value carts.

Can I text everyone who left a phone number in the checkout?

Not automatically. In many EU countries a cart reminder counts as direct marketing. That needs a lawful basis, usually consent collected in the checkout, and every message has to give the customer an easy way to opt out. The rules differ from country to country, so check them with a lawyer for each market you sell to. How RevOrder handles STOP replies and opt-outs is described on the SMS marketing page.

Does this work with Shopify, WooCommerce and other platforms?

Yes. Started checkouts reach RevOrder through the Shopify app, the WooCommerce plugin or RevOrder's checkout script on platforms such as ConvertBuilder, and the automations are the same on all of them. What differs is how the store connects.

What does abandoned cart recovery cost with RevOrder?

The platform itself is free. SMS and Viber are charged per message sent (Viber is available on request), email by usage and the call center per handled order, so a quiet month costs little. Depending on how the Shopify app is installed, SMS is billed either through your Shopify bill or from your RevOrder balance. How charging works is explained on the pricing page, and every charge is itemised in your account.

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