Cart recovery (organic)

The organic-side cart recovery playbook reaches shoppers who abandoned their cart with a WhatsApp / SMS / email follow-up that includes a payment link letting them complete the order in one tap. It pairs with the paid cart recovery playbook for shoppers who don’t respond to the first touch.

Why server-side, not browser-side

Some platforms detect abandonment with a browser timer (“sat on checkout for 30 seconds, fire a popup”). That model breaks down for almost every real scenario:

• Misses tab-close, browser-crash, lost-network abandonments
• Burns battery
• Leaks timing logic into the browser

Active Reach detects abandonment server-side via a Celery beat scan over ClickHouse — storefront_cart_abandonment_scanner.py. The scanner finds carts where:

• cart.added fired
• No transaction.purchase followed within the abandonment window
• The contact hasn’t been touched by recovery in this window

This catches everything. The trade-off: detection latency is 15–30 minutes, not seconds. For cart recovery this is the right trade-off — most abandonments resolve themselves within 5 minutes; the 15–30 min lag means you only follow up with genuine abandoners. The same server-side beat model applies to search, browse, and checkout abandonment.

The playbook

T+30m   First touch — WhatsApp template with cart contents + payment link
T+4h    Second touch — same channel, gentler nudge if still unconverted
T+24h   Third touch — different channel (email if first touches were WA)
T+48h   Handoff to paid cart recovery (Meta DPA / Google Shopping)

(any point) Conversion → suppress every pending touch

Each touch is gated by the journey-driven dispatch policy — chat-first override, frequency caps, warm-offer collapse, and platform suppression all apply.

Payment link auto-injection

Every cart-recovery touch includes a one-tap payment link. The link is generated automatically — operators don’t need to think about it:

If you remove the placeholder by mistake, it gets re-injected at send-time so the link is never absent.

The link itself routes through your configured payment processor — see Cashfree integration for the wiring.

Activating the playbook

Cross-channel personalisation

The same playbook adapts the message to whichever channel ends up delivering:

You don’t author per-channel copies — the engine picks the right template family from your channel templates library based on the channel that actually delivers.

Recovery vs reminder

The first touch is a recovery — the shopper got distracted; here’s the cart, here’s a one-tap finish. The third touch is a reminder + incentive — they didn’t come back; here’s a small offer to nudge.

You configure the incentive ladder per playbook:

• Touch 1: no incentive
• Touch 2: no incentive
• Touch 3: 5% off (optional)

Some workspaces find that any incentive trains shoppers to abandon-and-wait for the discount. Run an experiment via the Incrementality framework before defaulting to incentives.

Measurement

The recovery dashboard at Engage → Automations → Cart recovery → Analytics shows:

• Carts detected — total abandonments
• Touches sent — by leg
• Recoveries — carts that purchased after a touch
• Net incremental — using the holdout configured in Incrementality
• Channel conversion — which channel converted highest (for tuning the channel mix)

What’s next

• Cart recovery ads — the paid leg of the recovery playbook
• Journey-driven dispatch — dispatch policy that governs every touch
• Cashfree integration — payment-link processor