How Many Abandoned Cart Emails Should a Store Send?

Mailchimp's classic abandoned cart series sends three emails: one hour after a shopper leaves a cart, one day after, and three days after. Klaviyo's ready made flow waits four hours before its first message. Shopify's Messaging app gives a store's second abandoned checkout automation a default wait of ten hours before its email goes out.

The three tools disagree on how many reminders to send and how soon. Only Klaviyo points to research: its help center says research from thousands of its ecommerce customers shows two or three abandoned cart messages perform best, and it links a benchmark report. That report, a Klaviyo blog post dated October 2, 2026, draws on more than 110,000 Klaviyo customers and reports open rates, click rates and revenue per recipient. On the number of messages, it says the answer depends on the industry, product line and business goals, and offers as an example a common sequence of three messages, one of them a text message. It shows no test of sequence length. Shopify and Mailchimp give no basis for their defaults.

Mailchimp's series and Klaviyo's advice overlap, and the overlap is a sound place to start: two or three emails over about three days, the first within a few hours of the abandoned checkout, every one of them cancelled the moment the shopper buys. A store then has to compare shoppers who got the emails with shoppers who got none, a comparison the platforms' own recovery reports do not make.

Why carts are left behind

Baymard Institute, a research firm that studies checkout design, keeps a list of 50 published measurements of cart abandonment, from 2006 to 2025, and averages them at 70.22 percent. The studies use different methods and populations, so the average is a rough gauge rather than a benchmark for any one store. Baymard last updated the list on September 22, 2025. As software agents begin shopping on people's behalf, some abandoned carts may not belong to a person at all, and the agent shopper question asks who should get the reminder then.

The reasons shoppers give are more useful. In Baymard's survey of United States online shoppers, 42 percent said they had abandoned a cart because they were just browsing or not ready to buy. Among shoppers who left for other reasons, 40 percent cited extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees, 20 percent slow delivery, 19 percent not trusting the site with card details and 18 percent being asked to create an account.

A reminder can bring back a shopper who was interrupted, comparing prices or waiting for payday. It cannot fix a shipping charge that appeared at the last step. If abandonment is concentrated at shipping or payment, the repair belongs on the site, and it starts with the reasons customers walk away from clear offers.

What the platforms do by default

Klaviyo's help center recommends sending the first message two to four hours after someone starts checkout and a second 20 to 48 hours later, and its own flow uses a four hour delay. It warns that emailing too soon can come off as pushy and suggests longer delays for considered purchases, using mattresses as its example. Stores on integrations other than Shopify and BigCommerce may find that checkout data syncs only hourly, so for those stores it recommends that any short first delay be at least an hour and 15 minutes. Klaviyo also suggests running two separate flows, one for shoppers who added to cart and one for those who started checkout, with a filter so nobody receives both.

Shopify's abandoned checkout automation now lives in its Messaging app. By default it sends only to customers subscribed to email marketing, and a store can change the wait time by editing the workflow in Shopify Flow. Among other cases, Shopify will not send the email when the customer has already bought, when nothing in the checkout is available, when the shopper gave only a phone number, or when Shopify Payments blocked the attempt as high risk.

Mailchimp's classic automations offer a single email that can wait one, six or 24 hours, or the three email series. Only paid accounts that have created a classic automation before can use them; other accounts build cart emails in Mailchimp's newer Marketing Automation Flows. Contacts who gave an email address at checkout without opting in to marketing receive only the first email in the series.

How many abandoned cart emails to send, and when

For a store without its own test results, the sequence below is a starting point. The count matches what Klaviyo recommends from its customer data. The timing is a judgment drawn from where the platform defaults overlap, and none of the platforms has published a test of it.

1. The first email, two to four hours after checkout stops. That sits inside Klaviyo's range and later than Mailchimp's one hour, which leaves a shopper time to finish on their own. It shows only the items left behind, as Klaviyo advises, and a button back to the cart.
2. The second email, about a day later. This is the place to answer the objections Baymard's survey names: the delivery date, the shipping cost, the return policy, how payment is secured.
3. An optional third, around day three, sent only to shoppers subscribed to marketing. If the store offers an incentive at all, it goes here.

Shoppers who never agreed to marketing email need a separate decision. Shopify's automation skips them by default, and Mailchimp sends them only the first email of its series, so a store should know which shoppers its platform includes before it adds messages.

Shopify's help page calls a discount a great way to encourage customers to complete checkout. Klaviyo advises against a coupon in the first email, because it can teach customers to abandon carts to get one, and suggests saving any incentive for the final email or for people who have never bought. For a small store with thin margins, the recommendation is Klaviyo's.

Whatever the delays, the sequence should stop when the shopper buys. Klaviyo checks its purchase filter before each message, and Shopify skips a checkout that became an order. A shopper who abandons often should not restart the sequence every time, and Klaviyo offers a filter that excludes anyone who was in the flow within a set number of days. A store selling expensive or considered goods should stretch the delays rather than add emails.

Text message reminders run under separate consent rules, which SMS automation sets out, and email marketing automation places the cart flow among the other automated emails a store can run.

Measure what the emails recovered

Shopify counts a checkout as recovered after an email is sent if the customer completes the order, whether through the link in the email or on their own. Its abandoned checkouts report therefore also credits the emails with shoppers who would have come back anyway.

The better measure is a comparison. If the email platform can split a flow at random, hold back a small share of abandoned checkouts from the sequence for a few weeks and compare the purchase rate of the two groups. The difference is what the emails added. Then check each email on its own. If the third draws more unsubscribes and spam reports than orders, cut it. Testing the sequence with and without its second email shows whether that message earns its place.

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday

On the sale weekend the same shopper may already be receiving several promotional emails a day. Before the sale, the Black Friday website checklist has a store place a test checkout, leave it, and confirm the first message arrives.

During the sale, keep the flow on and check its timing against the campaign calendar. An engaged shopper who abandons a cart on Friday morning can receive a cart reminder and a sale announcement within the same hour, so the Black Friday segmentation plan should send recent abandoners fewer campaign emails. A cart email offering a code on top of a sitewide discount can also stack in ways the store never priced; decide how the two combine when planning the sale's merchandising.

Google's sender guidelines say recipients, not Google, decide what kind of message they received, so a cart reminder that lands beside a run of sale emails can be reported as spam like any promotion. Those reports count toward the complaint rate limits in what Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.