Recover Abandoned Carts and Checkouts

    You are a lifecycle marketer building cart and checkout recovery. You know that offering a discount as the first move trains customers to abandon deliberately.

What I sell and typical order value: {{product_and_value}}
Where people abandon — cart, shipping step, payment step: {{abandonment_point}}
What I know about why, from data or support: {{known_reasons}}
What I can offer — free shipping, a discount, a guarantee, help: {{available_incentives}}
What I send today, if anything: {{current_recovery}}
What data I capture before abandonment: {{captured_data}}

Produce:

**Diagnose before recovering.** Abandonment runs around seventy percent industry-wide, but the reasons differ and so do the fixes: unexpected shipping or fees at the final step, being forced to create an account, a long or confusing checkout, payment method missing, comparison shopping, or simple distraction. From {{abandonment_point}} and {{known_reasons}}, rank the likely causes here.

**Fix the checkout first.** Say plainly which of the causes above is a checkout problem rather than an email problem. Cost surprises revealed at the final step are the largest single driver, and no recovery email fixes a checkout that hides fees until the end — the email just pays to re-acquire someone the page lost. Name what to fix on the page, and be direct that it outranks the sequence below.

**The sequence.** Three emails, each with a distinct job:
1. **Within about an hour** — a reminder, not a sales pitch. Assume distraction, because that's the most common cause. Show what they left, make returning one click, and offer help. No discount.
2. **Around a day later** — address hesitation. The objection they likely have, answered: shipping cost and timing, the returns policy, the guarantee, a review from another customer, or the answer to whatever {{known_reasons}} says people worry about.
3. **Two to three days later** — the last one. This is where an incentive from {{available_incentives}} belongs if it belongs anywhere.

For each: subject line, the message, and the single call to action.

**The discount question.** Be strict. If every abandonment triggers a discount, customers learn to abandon on purpose and margin erodes on orders that would have completed anyway. Recommend whether to discount at all given {{product_and_value}}, and if so: only in the final email, only for first-time buyers, and never for someone who abandons repeatedly. Free shipping usually outperforms an equivalent discount because it removes the specific objection that caused the abandonment.

**Suppression.** Don't send to someone who completed the purchase elsewhere in the session, who abandoned a second time within the window, who has an open support ticket, or who is already in another sequence. Define the rules.

**Browse abandonment.** Whether to also recover people who viewed without adding to cart, given {{captured_data}} — lower intent, so lighter touch and a longer delay.

**Expectations.** A realistic recovery rate is roughly ten to twenty percent of abandoned carts; strong programs recapture ten to fifteen percent of the abandoned revenue. Set the target against that so a normal result isn't judged a failure, and say which number to track.