Somebody filled a basket on your store this week, reached the checkout, and left. Probably several somebodies. It stings more than ordinary browsing because they did almost everything — chose the products, started the form — and then the delivery cost appeared, or the kettle boiled, or the train pulled in. An abandoned cart is rarely a no. Most of the time it's a "not right now", and "not right now" is recoverable.
How common is this, really?
Very. The Baymard Institute maintains a long-running average across dozens of published cart-abandonment studies, and it sits at roughly 70%. Seven in ten carts, across the industry, never become orders. Treat that as a benchmark rather than a verdict — the figure varies by sector and by how you count, and it includes plenty of people who were only ever comparing prices or saving things for later.
Two things follow from it. First, abandonment is normal, so a high rate on your store is not by itself a crisis. Second, the pool of nearly-customers is large, which means a modest recovery rate is real money. Say you take £8,000 a month at a £40 average order — that's 200 orders. If your abandonment rate is around the benchmark, roughly 470 carts walked away in the same period. Win back just 5% of those and you've added about £940 a month, from people who had already decided they wanted the thing.
Why people leave in the first place
Surprise costs are the biggest cause we see. A £6.95 delivery charge that only appears at the final step doesn't just lose that order — it teaches the shopper your prices can't be trusted at face value. If delivery depends on the address, say so on the cart page. If you offer free delivery over a threshold, show how far off they are.
Forced account creation is the second. Someone trying to buy a gift at 10pm does not want to invent a password. Let people check out as guests and invite them to make an account afterwards, once the sale is safe.
Slow, long checkouts do the quiet damage. Every extra field, every page that takes three seconds to load on a phone, is a chance to reconsider. Fix these things before you think about recovery emails — a reminder can't rescue a checkout people didn't want to return to.
What a recovery flow actually is
Strip away the jargon and it's one thing: a timed email. When a shopper gets partway through checkout and leaves without paying, the system saves their cart, waits a set period, then emails them what they left behind — with a link that drops them straight back into that saved cart, and optionally a discount code generated just for that email.
That's it. There's no dark art. The email works because the hard part of the sale already happened: they found the product, they wanted it, and something interrupted them. You're not persuading; you're reminding.
One honest constraint: you can only email people whose address you captured before they left. Shoppers who abandon before typing an email are gone, which is one more argument for asking for the email early in checkout rather than last.
Timing: catch intent while it's warm
Send too soon and it feels like surveillance — they only closed the tab ten minutes ago. Send too late and the moment has passed; they've bought elsewhere or moved on. The useful window is somewhere between one hour and a day.
As a starting point: two to four hours suits most stores selling everyday items, because intent is still fresh that same evening. For considered purchases — furniture, anything over a couple of hundred pounds — a longer delay of twelve to twenty-four hours respects the fact that people genuinely need time to decide. Pick one, watch the numbers for a month, then adjust. There is no universally correct answer, only your customers' answer.
Discounts: the lever to pull last
The reflex is to bundle a 10% code into every recovery email from day one. Resist it. Start with a plain reminder — cart contents, a link back, a decent subject line — and see what that recovers on its own. Plenty of abandonment was interruption, not hesitation about price, and those orders come back for free.
If plain reminders genuinely underperform, then add an incentive, and keep it modest: 10% or a small fixed amount, enough to nudge without torching the margin. On a £40 order at a 50% gross margin, a 10% code gives up £4 of £20 — fine occasionally, painful as a default on every recovered sale.
Measuring recovered revenue honestly
Count an order as recovered when it comes back through the recovery email — the shopper clicked the link and completed the saved cart. Track the funnel at each stage: emails queued, sent, clicked, and orders recovered, so you can see where the drop-off is rather than guessing.
Then apply two honest corrections. Some of those shoppers would have returned anyway, email or not, so treat your recovered figure as a ceiling rather than a pure gain. And if you're discounting, measure margin recovered, not revenue recovered — £900 of recovered orders at 10% off is not £900. Published benchmarks for recovery rates land in the 5–15% range, with discounted emails trending toward the higher end. If you're inside that band, you're doing fine; if you're well below it, look at timing and subject lines before reaching for a bigger discount.
The mistakes that cost more than they recover
Discounting too eagerly. Covered above, but worth repeating because it's the most common one: a discount in every email turns a recovery tool into a standing 10%-off-everything policy you never meant to announce.
Training customers to abandon. Your regulars are not daft. If abandoning a cart reliably produces a code within a few hours, some of them will learn the trick — fill the basket, close the tab, wait for the email. Keep codes modest, don't advertise that abandonment earns one, and keep an eye on whether the same customers keep redeeming recovery codes. If they do, you've built a loyalty discount by accident, and you should decide on purpose whether you want one.
Sending a barrage. One well-timed email does most of the work. A three-email drip squeezes out a little more but risks annoying someone who already came back — or was never coming back. The inbox is borrowed space; treat it that way.
Where Orbit fits
Abandoned cart recovery is built into every Orbit plan — it isn't a paid add-on. You pick the delay (1, 2, 4, 6, 12 or 24 hours), optionally let Orbit generate a fresh discount code for each email with your own prefix, and every cart is tracked from queued to sent to clicked to recovered, with the recovered revenue shown in pounds on your dashboard. It sends one email per abandoned checkout, deliberately. Set it once and it quietly covers every cart after that.