Many Ecommerce Stores Leave Money on the Table,

And you may not even know you’re doing it.

Ecommerce businesses spend enormous amounts of time, money and effort attracting visitors to their websites. They invest in Google Ads, Meta campaigns, search engine optimisation, social media and increasingly sophisticated marketing technologies, all with the objective of generating more sales.

But while they’re concentrating on bringing more people through the virtual front door, how much attention are they paying to the shopping opportunities they’re already missing?

Most Shopify retailers are familiar with abandoned-cart emails. They’re among the first automations businesses implement when setting up a platform such as Klaviyo, and for good reason. Reminding someone about products they’ve left behind can be an effective way to encourage them to complete a purchase.

There’s just one rather fundamental limitation: you can’t send an abandoned-cart email to a shopper you can’t identify.

And as it turns out, that might be a much bigger problem than many retailers realise.

The question that started it all

When the team behind CartSave was working on the ecommerce store of a major international fitness brand, they encountered a familiar problem: a substantial number of abandoned shopping carts.

Rather than simply asking how they could recover more of those carts, someone posed a more fundamental question:

“How many of those shoppers are we actually able to follow up with?”

According to CartSave founder Joe Rollinson, that question prompted the team to investigate the store’s Magento data, revealing a significant gap in their ability to identify shoppers. The experience would eventually help inspire CartSave’s development.

Joe says CartSave has subsequently observed that approximately 80% of abandoned carts are associated with shoppers retailers cannot identify through their existing systems, based on examining retailers’ cart activity before activating its identification and recovery technology.

While CartSave’s 80% estimate is based on its own observations rather than independent industry-wide research, other studies highlight the scale of the broader problem.

For example, the Baymard Institute reports an average online shopping cart abandonment rate of approximately 70%, based on 50 studies. Meanwhile, research by customer engagement platform Braze, covering 2.5 billion active users across more than 100 retail and ecommerce apps, found that 86% were anonymous. Although these studies measure different things, they reinforce the prevalence of abandoned carts and unidentified shoppers.

Nevertheless, the question that prompted the original investigation is one that every ecommerce business should be asking.

Before worrying about how many abandoned carts you’re recovering, how many are you actually capable of recovering?

The shoppers your abandoned-cart automation cannot reach

Imagine someone visiting your Shopify store, browsing several products and adding a couple of items to their cart. Perhaps they become distracted, want to compare prices elsewhere or simply decide to think about the purchase overnight.

They leave without completing their order.

If your email marketing platform can identify that shopper, and they’re eligible to receive a recovery message, your abandoned-cart automation may be able to encourage them to return.

But what if the platform doesn’t know who they are?

The shopping activity may still be recorded in Shopify, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Klaviyo can associate it with an identifiable customer profile. Without that association, there may be no way to send the shopper a recovery email.

The opportunity effectively disappears from your email recovery process.

It’s worth distinguishing between an anonymous website visitor, an unidentified shopper and a customer who can legitimately receive marketing communications. These aren’t necessarily the same thing. Someone may have visited your store previously without being recognised during their latest session, while an identifiable customer may not have the necessary permissions to receive particular messages.

Similarly, not every abandoned cart represents a lost sale. Some shoppers are browsing, researching or comparing options, and others may return and purchase without any intervention.

But the underlying issue remains: if you can’t identify relevant shopping activity, you can’t fully evaluate or act on the opportunities it represents.

And that raises another question. Rather than continually spending more money attracting visitors, could retailers generate worthwhile additional sales by recognising more of the shoppers already demonstrating purchase intent?

How Shopify, Klaviyo and CartSave fit together

For Shopify retailers using Klaviyo, one common approach to abandoned-cart recovery relies on Shopify’s ‘Added to Cart’ event.

When Klaviyo receives this event and can associate it with an identifiable customer profile, it can trigger an automated recovery sequence, subject to the relevant flow conditions, permissions and exclusions.

This is useful functionality, but it doesn’t necessarily mean every shopper who adds something to their cart can be identified or contacted.

CartSave approaches the problem from another direction, introducing additional shopper-identification capabilities and generating its own ‘Cart Started’ event, which can be used to trigger recovery automation through Klaviyo.

The distinction is important because Shopify, Klaviyo and CartSave aren’t necessarily competing solutions. They perform different, potentially complementary roles.

It’s worth noting that these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. A shopper may trigger both Shopify’s ‘Added to Cart’ and CartSave’s ‘Cart Started’ events during the same session. Consequently, the number of events shouldn’t simply be added together when measuring identification coverage or recovery opportunities. The real opportunity lies in identifying shoppers and shopping activity that might otherwise have remained beyond the reach of existing recovery automation.

There’s also an important difference in the recovery experience itself.

In the Shopify/Klaviyo implementation I examined, the conventional ‘Added to Cart’ recovery email directed shoppers back to an individual product page, rather than restoring their abandoned cart. CartSave, by comparison, could reconstruct the entire cart, including the products and variants previously selected, even when the shopper returned using a different device.

Imagine someone adding three products to their cart while browsing on their phone, then deciding to complete their purchase later on a laptop. Rather than having to find and select those products again, they can follow their recovery link and pick up where they left off.

Of course, conventional Shopify/Klaviyo recovery experiences can be configured differently, so this isn’t a limitation of every ‘Added to Cart’ flow. Nevertheless, reducing friction between a shopper’s original intent and their eventual purchase is an important consideration.

And there’s another potential benefit that extends well beyond recovering the immediate transaction.

When an otherwise unidentified shopper voluntarily provides their email address, the retailer may gain an opportunity to develop an ongoing customer relationship, subject to the permissions they’ve granted. Someone who initially opts in to receive a cart reminder could subsequently become a first-time customer, a repeat purchaser and, potentially, a valuable long-term customer.

The opportunity isn’t simply to recover an abandoned transaction. It’s to recognise and build relationships with customers who might otherwise have remained unknown.

What happens when you identify more shoppers?

An interesting example comes from a CartSave implementation I’ve been examining, where the recovery automation distinguishes between shoppers who actively provided their contact details through a CartSave cart-saving interaction and those identified through other mechanisms, such as email marketing or email-entry fields elsewhere on the website.

In CartSave’s terminology, these groups are classified as Prompted and Not prompted, respectively.

Prompted

Not prompted

Source: Anonymised Klaviyo recovery email reports, 365-day period.

What’s particularly interesting isn’t simply the difference in attributed revenue. The prompted group also recorded considerably lower bounce and unsubscribe rates, raising an interesting question about the relationship between how shoppers are identified, their willingness to receive reminders and their subsequent engagement.

So why might shoppers who actively request a cart reminder respond so differently?

My hypothesis is that explicitly inviting shoppers to save their carts and receive a reminder may produce a more receptive audience. Someone who voluntarily provides their contact details for that purpose has expressed an interest in receiving the communication, rather than simply having their shopping activity trigger an automated email.

This aligns with a principle I’ve long advocated at Finlayson Digital: consent isn’t simply a compliance requirement. It’s the foundation of a more relevant, respectful and potentially more valuable customer relationship.

Of course, we need to be careful about drawing conclusions from these figures. The two groups may differ in purchase intent, how their contact details were obtained and when they received their reminders. They also receive different recovery messages, so we cannot establish that the act of opting in caused the differences in performance.

It’s also important to recognise that shoppers identified without a CartSave prompt may already be known to the retailer through other channels. These figures compare different identification methods and subsequent email performance, not necessarily newly identified shoppers against existing customers.

Because the objective shouldn’t simply be to identify more shoppers. It should be to identify and engage more shoppers who actually want to hear from you.

IDENTIFY → CONVERT → VALUE

When evaluating cart-recovery technologies, I prefer to start with three questions rather than jumping straight to the revenue a platform claims to have generated.

IDENTIFY — How many relevant shopping opportunities can we recognise?

The first challenge is understanding how many shoppers demonstrating purchase intent can be associated with an actionable customer profile.

Importantly, we should distinguish between identifying shoppers who are already known to the business and recognising additional shopping opportunities that would otherwise remain unidentified.

A technology that associates more cart activity with existing customer profiles may still provide value, but that isn’t necessarily the same as identifying shoppers who would otherwise have remained unknown.

CONVERT — What happens after we’ve identified them?

Identification creates an opportunity, but doesn’t guarantee a sale. We need to understand whether the subsequent engagement is useful, whether shoppers respond to recovery messages and whether the experience helps them complete their purchases.

Click rates, placed-order rates and the quality of the recovery experience all matter. But so does the relevance of the communication, whether the shopper has actively requested a reminder and whether we’re respecting their preferences. The objective isn’t simply to send more recovery messages, but to make those messages more useful and welcome.

VALUE — What is the opportunity worth to the business?

Finally, we need to consider what those additional opportunities are worth to the business, both immediately and over time.

Attributed recovery revenue is one useful indicator, but it isn’t the same as incremental revenue or profit. We also need to consider gross margins, technology costs and the potential longer-term value of newly identified customers.

A shopper who completes a $150 purchase after receiving a cart reminder might subsequently return to purchase several more times. If the original interaction helped establish a new customer relationship, its commercial contribution could extend well beyond the first recovered transaction.

That future value isn’t guaranteed, and it shouldn’t automatically be attributed to the recovery technology. But it is a legitimate part of the commercial opportunity retailers should consider when evaluating the investment.

The paid advertising paradox

Imagine an ecommerce retailer spending $5,000 on Google Ads and seeing $25,000 in attributed revenue.

That’s a reported return on advertising spend of 5:1, which might look like an excellent result.

But how much of that revenue came from genuinely new customers? How many purchases involved existing customers searching for the retailer’s brand? And, most importantly, how many would have occurred without the advertising?

These are legitimate questions, yet retailers don’t always investigate them before deciding whether their advertising is performing well.

Now imagine the same retailer considering a technology designed to identify more abandoned carts and improve recovery.

Suddenly, every attributed sale may come under scrutiny. Would that customer have purchased anyway? Would Klaviyo have recovered the cart without the additional technology? Is the recovery platform claiming credit for revenue that would otherwise have occurred?

Those are equally legitimate questions, and I would encourage retailers to ask them.

But here’s the paradox: why would we demand a higher standard of proof from a relatively inexpensive cart-recovery technology than from an advertising programme costing thousands of dollars every month?

I’m not suggesting that retailers should accept vendor-attributed revenue at face value, or that every technology claiming to improve conversions deserves a place in the marketing budget.

Quite the opposite. I believe businesses should evaluate their marketing investments consistently, whether we’re talking about Google Ads, Meta, Klaviyo, CartSave or any other technology. Attribution can help us understand which activities are associated with sales, but it doesn’t establish how much additional value those activities actually create.

And perhaps that’s where we need to rethink our priorities.

Contribution matters more than claiming credit

Ecommerce marketing has become increasingly preoccupied with attribution. Every platform wants to demonstrate how much revenue it generates, yet customers rarely follow a single, neatly attributable path to purchase.

Someone might discover a product through Google, return after seeing a social media advertisement, read customer reviews and eventually complete their purchase after receiving an abandoned-cart reminder. Which channel deserves the credit?

It’s a useful question, but I don’t believe it’s the most important one.

I’d argue that retailers should approach marketing performance through a hierarchy of commercial questions:

CONTRIBUTION → INCREMENTALITY → ATTRIBUTION

Contribution: Is there evidence that this activity is helping move the business in the right direction, whether through increased sales, improved profitability, greater customer value or reduced costs?

Incrementality: It appears to be contributing, but is it actually moving the needle? How much additional value is being created that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred?

Attribution: With so many different touchpoints influencing a customer’s purchasing decision, which activities deserve the most credit?

This isn’t a rigid measurement process, but a way of prioritising the questions we ask. Contribution provides an initial indication of commercial value, incrementality demands stronger evidence of actual impact, and attribution helps us understand how credit might be distributed.

Yet many marketers spend an inordinate amount of time debating attribution before adequately considering the first two questions.

Perhaps it’s time we got our priorities in the right order.

Before you spend more money attracting shoppers…

None of this is an argument against paid advertising, or a suggestion that every Shopify retailer should install CartSave. Advertising can be an excellent investment, and conventional abandoned-cart automation already provides considerable value for many businesses.

But there’s a danger in assuming that the answer to slower sales growth is always more traffic, more campaigns or bigger advertising budgets.

If you’re investing heavily in attracting shoppers to your website, surely it makes sense to understand how many of those visitors are demonstrating genuine purchase intent, how many you can identify and how effectively you’re engaging with them. And, importantly, whether improving those capabilities could generate a better commercial return from the traffic you’re already paying to attract.

That doesn’t mean treating every abandoned cart as a lost sale or assuming that every recovery technology will pay for itself. It means understanding the opportunities, evaluating their potential value and making informed decisions about where to invest.

Which brings us back to the question that helped inspire CartSave’s development:

Of all the shoppers abandoning their carts, how many are you actually able to follow up with?

Before spending more money bringing people through the virtual front door, perhaps it’s worth finding out how many shopping opportunities are already slipping through your fingers.

Because better ecommerce doesn’t always require more visitors. Sometimes it starts with making better use of the ones you’ve already attracted.

Curious how many shopping opportunities your store might be missing?

Finlayson Digital can help you evaluate your existing cart-recovery capabilities and explore whether additional identification technology such as CartSave makes commercial sense for your business.