An abandoned cart flow is an automated sequence of emails and/or SMS messages triggered when a customer adds products to their cart but leaves your store without completing the purchase. It is consistently the highest-ROI automated flow in e-commerce - reaching shoppers at the precise moment they have demonstrated clear purchase intent, with a specific product already selected, and recovering revenue that would otherwise be permanently lost.
The scale of the opportunity is significant: industry data consistently shows that 70-75% of shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Even recovering a fraction of those - which a well-built cart flow reliably does - represents meaningful incremental revenue at near-zero marginal cost, since the infrastructure is built once and runs automatically. For most Shopify brands using Klaviyo, the abandoned cart flow is the single best-performing automation in their account by revenue generated per email sent.
A high-performing abandoned cart flow typically consists of three messages with distinct jobs. The first email (sent 30-60 minutes after abandonment) is a simple, direct reminder - cart contents, product image, a clear return-to-cart button. No discounting. Many customers abandoned simply because they got distracted, and a clean reminder is sufficient to recover them. The second email (sent 24 hours later) adds more persuasive content: social proof, reviews for the specific product, answers to common objections, or a stronger value proposition for the brand. The third email (sent 48-72 hours later) is the intervention - this is where a time-limited discount or free shipping offer can be deployed for customers who still haven't converted, without training your entire customer base to wait for a discount on every purchase.
The abandoned cart flow is closely related to the browse abandonment flow (triggered when someone views a product but doesn't add to cart) and the checkout abandonment flow (triggered when someone starts the checkout process but doesn't complete it). Together, these three flows form the core of any Shopify brand's automated revenue recovery infrastructure.
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