ABANDONED CARTS

The abandoned carts
you should not recover

Some of a store's carts have nobody behind them. Others do, but writing would cost more than staying silent. Here is how to tell them apart before you send.

THE ANSWER, RIGHT AWAY

Four families of carts to leave alone

Carts with no human behind them, disposable or fabricated addresses, carts already converted or already contacted, and carts whose intent signals are all flat. The sorting happens before sending, from what the store already knows. After sending it is too late: the message is out, and so is the complaint.

WHAT IS NOT A CUSTOMER

Part of your carts is not human

Price comparison bots, catalogue scrapers, automated stock checks, payment tests, trials run by the store itself. All of them fill the same fields a customer fills, and all of them land in the same abandoned cart list. None will read a message, and some will report it as spam.

THE SIGNALS

How to recognise them

None of these signals proves anything on its own. What decides is their agreement, coming from independent families.

An address on a disposable domain

These domains exist to receive one message and vanish. Writing there produces a bounce, and bounces damage the sender reputation of the store's domain.

An address that looks fabricated

A string with no structure, a repeated pattern, a local part unrelated to any name. Weak on its own, strong in company.

The same cart, several times

Identical carts dropped hours apart in the same store describe a script, not hesitation.

Several abandonments in one day

One address abandoning several carts within twenty-four hours is either an automation or a customer no extra message will help.

A checkout never started

A cart left before any payment step carries far less intent than a checkout abandonment. That is a weight, not an exclusion.

A form empty of everything else

No first name, no phone, no recognisable domain. Again: a hint, not a proof.

THE PRICE OF A POINTLESS MESSAGE

What a recovery sent for nothing costs

The cost is not the price of the send. It sits elsewhere, and it is paid later.

The domain's sender reputation. Bounces and complaints add up, and it is the next messages, the ones addressed to real customers, that end up in spam.
The readability of your numbers. Sends addressed to automations dilute everything measured afterwards, and the decisions made on those numbers are skewed in turn.
The customer's patience. An inbox is a finite space: what is spent on a cart that never mattered is no longer available for the one that did.

WHERE THIS FAILS

The false positives, owned

A sorting that never gets it wrong does not exist. These three cases drop a real customer, and that has to be said.

The cautious customer, ordering with a secondary address to avoid giving out their own. It looks like a disposable address, and it is real.
The shared address, at home or at work, from which several carts leave the same day. The pattern looks like an automation, and it is several people.
The market where a phone number is never given, and where forms stay minimal out of local habit. A thin form says nothing about intent there.

The rule that limits the damage is simple: proof of a human, an order already placed or a click observed, closes the debate before it starts. Doubt goes to the customer.

WHAT TO REMEMBER

Four sentences

1Contacting every cart is not a strategy, it is the absence of sorting.
2A lone signal rules nothing out. Two signals from independent families do.
3The cost of a pointless message is paid by the next messages, not by that one.
4Silence is not the system failing. It is a decision, and it must carry its reason.

Read the full method, limits included

WHAT IT RESTS ON

The stated cost, checkable

What a pointless message costs is not something to take on trust. Mailbox providers publish their thresholds, and the French authority publishes the rules for commercial email.

What is left is watching this sorting run on your own carts.

Start the 14-day trial

14-day free trial · No credit card required

Chargement de la page...

Four families of carts to leave alone

How to recognise them

None of these signals proves anything on its own. What decides is their agreement, coming from independent families.

An address on a disposable domain

These domains exist to receive one message and vanish. Writing there produces a bounce, and bounces damage the sender reputation of the store's domain.

An address that looks fabricated

A string with no structure, a repeated pattern, a local part unrelated to any name. Weak on its own, strong in company.

The same cart, several times

Identical carts dropped hours apart in the same store describe a script, not hesitation.

Several abandonments in one day

One address abandoning several carts within twenty-four hours is either an automation or a customer no extra message will help.

A checkout never started

A cart left before any payment step carries far less intent than a checkout abandonment. That is a weight, not an exclusion.

A form empty of everything else

No first name, no phone, no recognisable domain. Again: a hint, not a proof.

What a recovery sent for nothing costs

The cost is not the price of the send. It sits elsewhere, and it is paid later.

The domain's sender reputation. Bounces and complaints add up, and it is the next messages, the ones addressed to real customers, that end up in spam.

The readability of your numbers. Sends addressed to automations dilute everything measured afterwards, and the decisions made on those numbers are skewed in turn.

The customer's patience. An inbox is a finite space: what is spent on a cart that never mattered is no longer available for the one that did.

The false positives, owned

A sorting that never gets it wrong does not exist. These three cases drop a real customer, and that has to be said.

The cautious customer, ordering with a secondary address to avoid giving out their own. It looks like a disposable address, and it is real.

The shared address, at home or at work, from which several carts leave the same day. The pattern looks like an automation, and it is several people.

The market where a phone number is never given, and where forms stay minimal out of local habit. A thin form says nothing about intent there.

The rule that limits the damage is simple: proof of a human, an order already placed or a click observed, closes the debate before it starts. Doubt goes to the customer.

Four sentences

1Contacting every cart is not a strategy, it is the absence of sorting.

2A lone signal rules nothing out. Two signals from independent families do.

3The cost of a pointless message is paid by the next messages, not by that one.

4Silence is not the system failing. It is a decision, and it must carry its reason.

Read the full method, limits included