How Recovery Works
Follow one abandoned cart from the first email typed at checkout to a recovered order, and learn the statuses it moves through on the way.
Once you know the path a cart takes, the rest of ShapedRecover makes sense: what the Abandoned table is showing you, when emails go out, and why the Dashboard counts what it counts. This page follows one shopper, Maya, through the whole thing.
The short version
- Maya types her email at checkout. ShapedRecover saves her cart. Status: Shopping.
- She leaves. 15 minutes later, with no order, the cart is Abandoned. The table shows it as Recoverable.
- Your campaigns email her on schedule: 1 hour later, 1 day later, 2 days later.
- She clicks the link in an email, her cart is back, she pays. Status: Recovered. The remaining emails are cancelled.
And if things go differently:
- She comes back and buys without using the link → Ordered. Emails stop, but it isn't counted as a recovery.
- She never comes back → after 30 days, Lost.
- She clicks unsubscribe → she's never emailed again.
The rest of this page fills in the details.
1. The cart is captured
ShapedRecover can only email a shopper whose email address it knows, and who agreed to it. So nothing is saved until both of these are true:
- The shopper has typed a valid email address at checkout.
- The consent checkbox is ticked. It's ticked by default, so most shoppers just leave it. If they untick it, nothing about them is stored. See Consent Checkbox.
The moment both are true, ShapedRecover saves the email, any name typed, and what's in the cart (products, quantities, prices and total). It doesn't wait for the shopper to click Place order, or even to leave the email field: about a second after they stop typing is enough. That's what makes recovery possible for someone who types their email and then closes the tab.
Logged-in customers who ticked the box on an earlier visit are tracked from the moment they add something to the cart, without visiting the checkout at all.
Some shoppers are never tracked: users with a role you've excluded (Administrator and Shop Manager by default), and, with Pro, addresses on your Never Track list. See Exclusions.
Tracking starts switched off
Abandoned Tracking is off when you first install ShapedRecover, so nothing is captured until you turn it on. The Quick Start does this in step 1.
2. The cart becomes abandoned
While the shopper is still active, the cart's status is Shopping. Every change to the cart or the email counts as activity.
When the cart has had no activity for 15 minutes (the abandonment cutoff) and no order exists, it becomes Abandoned. In the Abandoned table this status is labelled Recoverable, because that's the point: it's a cart you can still win back.
ShapedRecover checks for newly abandoned carts every 5 minutes, so a cart can take up to 5 minutes longer than the cutoff to show as Recoverable. Email timing isn't affected by that: send times always count from the moment the cart actually became abandoned.
If the shopper comes back and changes their cart, it goes back to Shopping. The emails it hasn't had yet are rescheduled for when it's abandoned again.
You can change the cutoff in Settings → General → Mark Cart as Abandoned After (5 minutes to 24 hours). See General Settings.
3. The emails go out
A campaign is one recovery email: its subject and message, which carts it's for (its trigger), and how long after abandonment it sends (its delay). You can have as many as you like, each switched on or off.
ShapedRecover installs three starter campaigns, all switched off:
| Starter campaign (all "Checkout Abandoned –") | Sends after | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Soft Reminder | 1 hour | A friendly nudge to finish the order. |
| Inventory Hold Alert | 1 day | The reserved items won't be held forever, with a table of the cart's products. |
| 10% Discount Offer | 2 days | A personal 10% coupon that expires in 24 hours. |
When a cart becomes abandoned, every active campaign with a matching trigger is scheduled for it, at the abandonment time plus that campaign's delay. So with all three switched on, Maya gets an email after 1 hour, another after 1 day, and the coupon after 2 days, always in that order. Each campaign emails a cart once at most.
There are two triggers:
- Checkout abandoned: the shopper reached the checkout and left. This covers most carts, including every guest.
- Cart abandoned: a logged-in customer left items in their cart without visiting the checkout.
Every email includes a recovery link and an unsubscribe link. See Campaign List and Triggers & Timing.
Switched a campaign on late?
Turning a campaign on also schedules it for carts that are already abandoned, as long as their send time is still ahead. It never sends a pile of overdue emails at once.
4. The shopper comes back
The recovery link takes the shopper straight to your checkout (or cart page, if you prefer) with their cart rebuilt and their email filled in. If the email carried a personal coupon set to apply automatically, it's already applied. Items that are now out of stock or deleted are skipped, and a notice tells the shopper what changed.
Links in emails expire 7 days after the email was sent (a link copied from the cart drawer expires from the moment you copy it). You can change that, and where the link lands, in Settings → Sending. See Recovery Link.
5. The order is credited
When the shopper pays for an order placed through the recovery link, the cart becomes Recovered, and any emails still scheduled for it are cancelled.
ShapedRecover is strict about what counts. An order is recovered only if:
- it was placed in a visit that came through the recovery link,
- within 14 days of the email that carried that link,
- and it reached a paid status.
An order that merely shares the shopper's email address doesn't count. If a recovered order is later fully refunded, cancelled or marked failed, it's no longer credited. That's why you can trust the Recovered Revenue on your Dashboard and in Reports. Attribution & Audit shows how to check any credited sale.
The other endings
Ordered
If the shopper places an order without using the recovery link, say by coming back to your shop directly, the cart closes as Ordered, shown in grey. Its remaining emails are cancelled so they don't get a reminder for something they already bought, but the sale isn't counted as a recovery. The same happens when an order through the link fails or is cancelled before it's paid (a declined card, say), and to a recovered order that's later fully refunded, cancelled or marked failed.
Any order from the shopper stops their emails: same email or same account, any device.
Lost
If there's no order 30 days after the cart was abandoned (the lost cutoff), the cart becomes Lost and no more emails are sent for it. (If the shopper still places an order through a link from one of its emails within that email's 14 days, and the order is paid, it's credited as Recovered all the same.) You can change this in Settings → General → Mark Cart as Lost After. It has to be at least a day longer than your slowest active campaign's delay, so a cart is never marked lost before its last email goes out.
You can give a lost cart another chance with Restart Recovery in the Abandoned table. See Bulk Actions.
Unsubscribed
Every email has an unsubscribe link. It opens a short confirmation page, and once the shopper clicks its button, that address is never emailed by ShapedRecover again. See Unsubscribe & Privacy.
All five statuses
| Status | Label in the table | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Shopping | Shopping | Captured, and the shopper is still active. |
| Abandoned | Recoverable | No activity for the abandonment cutoff and no order. Recovery emails can send. |
| Recovered | Recovered | Paid through the recovery link within 14 days of the email. Counted in your recovered revenue. |
| Ordered | Ordered (grey) | Ordered without the recovery link, an order through the link that failed or was cancelled before payment, or a recovered order that was later fully refunded, cancelled or failed. Not counted as recovered or lost. |
| Lost | Lost | No order before the lost cutoff. |
Cart Statuses goes deeper, including what happens when a shopper comes back after an email, or abandons a second time.
Where to go next
- Quick Start: switch the loop on.
- Your First Campaign: set up a full email sequence.
- Attribution & Audit: exactly how recoveries are credited.