Abandoned checkouts in Shopify.
Find them, recover them, prevent them.

What counts as an abandoned checkout in Shopify.

Shopify is specific about this, and the specifics matter. A checkout counts as abandoned when a customer provides their email address at checkout but doesn't complete payment, and the checkout stays incomplete for more than ten minutes after the email was entered.¹

Two consequences follow from that definition:

• An abandoned checkout is not an abandoned cart. Someone who adds products to their cart and leaves without ever starting checkout — or who starts checkout but bails before typing an email — never appears in your abandoned checkouts list. The list only captures the people who got far enough to identify themselves.
• Every entry on the list is a warm lead. These shoppers picked products, opened your checkout, and handed over contact information. They are the closest thing to a sale you didn't make.

How big is the problem overall? The best-known industry figure comes from Baymard Institute, which maintains an average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate of 70.22%, aggregated from 50 separate studies (observed on baymard.com, September 3, 2026).³ Your store's own rate will differ — but across ecommerce, most carts are abandoned. Recovering even a slice of that is usually the cheapest revenue a store can find.

Where to find abandoned checkouts in Shopify.

The list lives inside your orders, not your marketing section:

1. Open your orders. From the Shopify admin, go to Orders.
2. Open the list. Click Abandoned checkouts.¹
3. Inspect a checkout. Click any entry to see what was in it and the customer's contact information.
4. Recover one manually. From an individual abandoned checkout, click the customer's email under their information to send a recovery email yourself — it carries a link that reopens their checkout so they can finish paying.¹

Check this list on a schedule, not just when you remember it exists: Shopify automatically deletes abandoned checkouts older than three months from the admin.¹ Whatever you were going to do with those leads, you have a 90-day window to do it.

Shopify's recovery emails — and their limits.

Shopify can email abandoners automatically. The current automation lives under Apps → Messaging → Automations: find Abandoned checkout emails by Shopify, edit its settings, and switch on Send abandoned checkout emails automatically. You choose who receives it, how long Shopify waits before sending — new automations default to a 10-hour delay — and you can customize the template and add a discount to the email.^1,2

That's genuinely useful, and every store should turn it on. But be honest with yourself about what it is:

• It's one email on one delay. You set a single wait time and Shopify sends a single recovery message per abandoned checkout — not a multi-touch sequence that follows up again two days later.^1,2
• It's email only. No SMS, no other channels.
• It skips whole categories of abandoners. Shopify won't send a recovery email when the customer left only a phone number instead of an email, when a payment processing error occurred, when you don't ship to their address, when every product in the checkout is out of stock, or when the checkout is entirely free with no shipping fee.¹
• It only covers two channels. Recovery emails apply to the Online Store and Buy Button sales channels — abandonments from POS or third-party channels aren't covered.^1,2
• Recipient targeting is limited by consent. By default the automation is aimed at customers subscribed to marketing; you control the recipient setting, and who you can lawfully email is ultimately your responsibility, not the toggle's.²

In short: the built-in automation is a safety net, not a strategy. Payment-error abandoners — people who tried to pay you and failed — are precisely the ones it skips.

A recovery sequence that actually works.

Stores that treat recovery seriously run a short, timed sequence rather than one message. The craft below is general good practice — test the timings against your own audience.

Principles that hold across the whole ladder:

• Speed beats cleverness on the first touch. The first email's job is to arrive while intent is still warm and the tab is still mentally open. Save persuasion for touch two.
• Show the cart. Recovery messages with the actual products, images, and prices give the shopper zero work to do. The link should land them back in a pre-filled checkout, not on your homepage.
• Hold the discount as long as you can. A discount in the final touch converts fence-sitters; a discount in the first touch becomes a coupon-fishing ritual for repeat visitors.
• Respect consent — it's not optional. SMS marketing requires the customer's express opt-in consent before you text them, and email marketing rules vary by region. Honor unsubscribes immediately, keep records of consent, and when in doubt talk to a lawyer — this guide is general practice, not legal advice.
• Stop the sequence the moment they buy. Nothing burns goodwill like a "complete your order" email an hour after the order was completed.

You can build parts of this ladder with Shopify's automation plus marketing apps. Or you can run checkout and follow-up in one system — Admoji's CRM ties its checkout to built-in Zapier automations, so the abandonment event and the follow-up flow live in the same dashboard.⁴ More on that below.

Reduce abandonment at the source.
The cheapest recovery is not losing them.

Recovery sequences work on the symptom. The disease is checkout friction — and it's well documented. In Baymard Institute's research on why shoppers abandon during checkout (observed September 3, 2026), the leading reasons include extra costs that appeared too late (40%), slow delivery (20%), not trusting the site with card details (19%), being forced to create an account (18%), and a checkout process that was too long or complicated (17%).³ Every one of those is a checkout design decision.

The fixes follow directly:

• Show the full cost early. Shipping, taxes, and fees on the cart page or first checkout step — not as a surprise at the end.
• Let guests be guests. Account creation is an ask for after the sale, not a toll booth before it.
• Cut fields ruthlessly. Every input you remove is a reason-to-quit you remove.
• Make trust visible. Clear returns policy, recognizable payment options, a checkout that looks like it belongs to your brand.

Here's the catch: on Shopify, how far you can take this depends on your plan. Every plan gets the branding editor — logo, colors, fonts, layout — but structural changes inside the checkout steps themselves are gated behind Shopify Plus. We've covered exactly what each tier allows in our guide to customizing your Shopify checkout page.

The other route is the one Admoji takes: keep your Shopify storefront and run your own checkout layer in front of it, on your own domain — like checkout.yourdomain.com — with every product, order, and customer syncing with Shopify in real time.⁴ Because the checkout is yours, the friction levers are yours too:

• A Shopify-style checkout built for conversion, with smart routing and payment retry logic baked in — so a soft decline gets retried instead of becoming an abandoned checkout.⁴
• One-click upsells in the purchase flow to raise the value of the checkouts you do complete — see our guide to Shopify checkout upsells.⁴
• A full CRM underneath the checkout, with Zapier automations built into the dashboard — describe the follow-up flow you want and Admoji's AI builds the automation, no tab-switching between your checkout data and your follow-up tool.⁴
• Your own merchant account behind it all — work with the processor you choose.⁴

Pricing is published: $79/mo + 0.35% of volume on the Launch plan, no long-term contracts, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required.⁴

Common questions.