The 70% who fill a cart and vanish

In today's Mailbites, we talk about the abandoned cart, the roughly seven in ten shoppers who add something, get all the way to checkout, and then disappear, and why the email you send next is usually aimed at the wrong problem.

Now, onto today's story.

The Story

Cart abandonment hovers around 70% for almost every store, and most founders read that number as a leak to be plugged. It isn't. People abandon carts for dozens of perfectly human reasons: they got distracted, the baby cried, they were comparison shopping, they wanted to think, they were never going to buy today and were just window shopping with a basket.

The mistake is assuming they all left for the same reason, and that the reason was price. So the cart email leads with a discount, and you end up paying people to complete purchases they were going to complete anyway, while training the rest to abandon on purpose because they've learned a coupon shows up if they wait.

A better cart sequence treats abandonment as what it usually is: a small dose of friction or doubt, not a price objection. It works through the doubt before it ever reaches for a discount.

• Email one, an hour or two later: a simple, helpful nudge. "You left this behind." No urgency theatre, no coupon. Half the recoveries you'll ever get come from this gentle reminder alone, because the person genuinely just got pulled away.
• Email two, the next day: handle the doubt. Reviews on the exact product they left, your return policy, shipping timelines, an answer to the question they didn't ask. This is where you earn the order honestly.
• Email three, day two or three: now, if you must, the nudge with a reason to act. And even here, urgency ("low stock," "your cart expires") often outperforms a discount, because it doesn't poison your margins or your full-price customers.

The sequence matters more than any single line of copy. Reach for the discount in email one and you've decided, on behalf of every abandoner, that they left over money. Most didn't.

One more thing worth checking before you blame the email: a huge share of abandonment is your checkout, not your customer. Surprise shipping costs, a forced account signup, a clumsy mobile form. The best abandoned cart email in the world can't fix a checkout that's quietly losing people on purpose. Fix the checkout first, then let the sequence mop up the genuine maybes.

Until next week,

Ani