How to Use Shopify to Recover Abandoned Checkouts

The short answer: if shoppers reach your Shopify checkout, type their email and leave, the abandoned checkout automation is the first email to switch on, because it costs nothing to send: abandoned checkout emails are always free and do not count toward the 10,000 free emails a month in Shopify Messaging, per the email pricing article (checked on 26 October 2026). The steps: look at what is being abandoned, turn on the template, decide who receives it and when, test it on yourself, let Campaign Autopilot propose the next emails for a person to approve, then read the results against the month before.

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The job is one email, done properly: the buyer who stopped at the payment step hears from you once, at a sensible time, and you can tell afterwards whether it brought orders back. What Shopify is and costs is in the Shopify glossary entry.

Before you switch it on:

1. Size the prize with your own numbers. For example, 300 abandoned checkouts a month at a $62 average cart, of which you assume 5 in 100 come back, is 300 x 0.05 = 15 orders, or 15 x $62 = $930 a month, for emails that cost $0 to send.
2. Start from the settings you already have. If the legacy abandoned checkout email is on, its settings carry over to the new automation, per the migration article. List any other automation that already reacts to an abandoned cart, so nothing sends twice.
3. Write down last month's baseline. Abandoned checkouts and how many of them became orders, from the list in step 1 below, before anything changes.

What you need

• Basic, Grow, Advanced or Plus. Shopify Messaging runs on those plans, per the email pricing article.
• The Shopify Messaging app, formerly Shopify Email, installed from Apps.
• Online Store or Buy Button checkouts. Only those receive the automation, per the migration article.

Step 1: Look at what is being abandoned

Open Orders, then Abandoned checkouts. A checkout counts as abandoned when it stays incomplete for more than ten minutes after the customer has entered an email address, according to the abandoned checkouts article, and checkouts Shopify Payments blocked as high risk sit in a separate Blocked view. Read twenty of them. Shipping costs that appear late, or one product that keeps showing up, are things an email will not fix.

Step 2: Turn on the template

Go to Apps, Messaging, Automations, click View templates and select the Abandoned checkout template. Edit the email if you want your own wording, then click Turn on automation, review and Continue, as the migration article lays out. Read the warning first: turning on the new automation is permanent, and you cannot go back to the legacy emails.

Step 3: Decide who receives it

By default the email goes only to customers subscribed to email marketing. The same article shows how to edit the To: field and choose All customers instead. In the EU that is a consent question before it is a setting: Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive, on EUR-Lex, requires prior consent for direct marketing by email to individuals, with a narrow exception for a business's existing customers. Someone who left at checkout has not bought yet, so keep the default unless your counsel says otherwise.

Step 4: Set when it sends

A new automation waits 10 hours by default, and the wait time and the rest of the workflow can be edited in Shopify Flow, per the migration article. The email is skipped when the customer buys before it goes out, or when the items are no longer available.

Step 5: Test it on yourself

Subscribe with an address of your own, start a checkout on the live store, enter that address and leave. After the wait, the email should arrive with a link back to your checkout. If it does not, check the Automations page for errors.

Step 6: Let Autopilot draft the rest, and approve each email yourself

Campaign Autopilot, under Growth, Autopilot, uses your products, customers and sales to recommend marketing actions, and you can ask Sidekick to set it up. For email, the Autopilot email article lists abandoned cart recovery and abandoned product browse among the automations it can draft in your branding. Each one waits in Pending actions until a person opens it, reads the subject line, content, audience and schedule, and clicks Approve or Dismiss.

That person has three checks. The segment cannot be changed, so make sure the audience in the preview is one you have consent to email. The subject line can only be regenerated, not typed. And if Autopilot proposes an abandoned checkout email while yours from step 2 is running, the article says to pause one or dismiss the tactic, so nobody gets two.

Autopilot itself is free to use, per its requirements article, and the tactics it proposes are where the bills sit: Shopify Messaging sends beyond the free allowance at $1 per 1,000, Shop Campaigns acquisition costs, and ad spend billed directly by Meta or Microsoft. Approve the abandoned checkout email, the one that is always free, before any of those.

Step 7: Recover a large cart by hand

For a single large order, open it in Orders, Abandoned checkouts and click the customer's email address; your email client opens with the recovery link. The abandoned checkouts article warns that anyone who opens that link can continue the checkout, so send it only to that customer.

What Shopify's help centre warns about

• The switch is one way. The new automation cannot be turned back into the legacy email.
• Two emails for one cart. Check existing automations before approving an Autopilot tactic.
• Recovery links forwarded. Anyone with the link can finish the checkout.
• AI drafts treated as finished. The Autopilot article asks you to review sender details, footer and consent as for any marketing email.

How to know it brought orders back

After four weeks, open the abandoned checkouts emails report in the Growth section and Shopify Messaging's analytics. Then do the free check the report cannot: take the share of abandoned checkouts that became orders in the four weeks before step 2 and compare it with the four weeks after, in the same season. The report credits the email with every buyer who came back after receiving it, including people who would have returned anyway; the before-and-after gap is closer to what the email changed. Later, if you want that difference measured continuously across email and paid channels, a causal measurement tool that tests what each channel changed, such as Causality Engine, does it; I founded it, so read that as a disclosure.

FAQ

Do abandoned checkout emails cost anything?

No. They are always free and do not count toward the monthly 10,000, per the email pricing article.

When does Shopify treat a checkout as abandoned?

When it stays incomplete for more than ten minutes after the customer entered an email, according to the abandoned checkouts article.

Can I choose who an Autopilot email goes to?

No. Autopilot selects the segment and you cannot change it, per the Autopilot email article; you can edit the body, regenerate the subject, or dismiss the tactic.