Abandoned carts.How to win them backwithout spam.
An abandoned cart is a shopping list with an address on it, not a lost sale. But recovery done badly is spam and a GDPR problem. Here is how the mechanism works in Torveo: what runs automatically, what needs consent, and how to check whether it earns anything at all.
Most stores treat an abandoned cart like a closed door. Yet the customer left specific products in it, and often an address too. The difference between recovery and spam sits in three places: when you consider a cart abandoned, on what legal basis you send reminders, and whether you can measure the effect. One by one.
When a cart counts as abandoned
Not every cart qualifies. It needs products and a recipient: a customer account or an email left at checkout. The default threshold is 2 days without activity, but the first step of the sequence can lower it: a push notification after 2 hours means the cart enters the game after 2 hours. You can also set a minimum cart value, so you do not chase carts worth pocket change. Any activity in the cart resets the sequence: a customer who came back on their own gets no reminder.
The sequence: a push, then three emails
The default sequence has four steps: a browser push notification after 2 hours, then emails after 1, 3 and 7 days. Push is the only channel that also reaches a guest without an account, provided they agreed to the store's notifications earlier. Daily steps go out at a set hour (9:00 by default), so a reminder never wakes anyone at night. Everything is editable per store: the number of steps, the gaps, the channels and a value threshold for each step separately.
SMS exists too, but it is deliberately fenced: it goes only to a customer with an account, a phone number and marketing consent, and it has its own monthly cap (200 by default), so the SMS gateway bill never surprises anyone on the first of the month.
One thing reminders deliberately do not carry: an automatic discount. A coupon glued to every email teaches customers to abandon carts for a price cut. If you want to give a discount, you do it by hand: an intervention from Pulse, with an existing code, for a specific session, once the customer is back in the store.
The way back, and consent
A reminder carries a return link with a token valid for 14 days by default. The link opens the exact cart the customer left, without automatic login: a deliberate security boundary, because an email link can end up in the wrong hands. If the cart has meanwhile disappeared or is empty, the link expires instead of showing a void.
The legal basis is a setting, not a guess. The default mode requires the customer's marketing consent and checks it twice: when the cart qualifies and right before sending, so withdrawing consent stops the sequence mid-flight. Guests without an account get reminders only if you enable address capture at checkout and pick a basis. Every email to a guest carries its own unsubscribe link, which erases the address from the cart.
Measurement instead of faith
The effectiveness report shows messages per channel, recovered purchases and revenue. A purchase counts as recovered when it was paid within a window from the first message (48 hours by default), one recovery per customer. There is also a control group: you can hold back a share of carts and see after a week how many people would have bought anyway, with no reminder at all.
An honest caveat: the report attributes recoveries only to customers with an account. A guest's purchase after a reminder is invisible to the report, so the numbers err on the low side. We prefer a report that undercounts to one that flatters itself.
An abandoned cart is a postponed decision, not a refusal. A push after two hours, three emails in a week, a link that truly opens the cart, and a report that tells the truth: that is enough to bring part of those decisions back. No farewell coupon and no spam.