Cart recovery still fails most merchants because fixed sequences cannot read shopper intent
Around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase, a figure that has stubbornly refused to budge despite three decades of ecommerce. The real problem is not that merchants lack cart recovery tools, it is that most of those tools treat abandonment as a single, uniform event when the underlying reasons vary enormously.
The distinction matters. A shopper who hit a payment error needs a frictionless route back to checkout. A shopper who was uncertain about sizing needs reassurance or a returns guarantee. A shopper who balked at the shipping cost needs a different offer entirely. A fixed automation sequence cannot tell these scenarios apart, so it defaults to broad assumptions, often firing a discount at someone who was already planning to return, or leading with product copy when price was the real obstacle.
For Dutch and Belgian merchants, this has a practical dimension. Cross-border delivery complexity, consumer expectations around free returns, and a high baseline of price comparison behaviour mean the gap between generic recovery sequences and well-targeted ones is wider here than in many other markets. A one-size sequence that works reasonably well in a large English-speaking market may perform poorly when the friction points are more varied.
The article frames the improvement path as a choice between manual optimisation and AI-driven decisioning. Manual optimisation still has strong fundamentals: reduce abandonment at source through transparent pricing and shipping costs, run A/B tests on message timing and copy, and use multi-channel sequences that combine email with SMS. These are concrete, low-cost levers any merchant can pull today. AI decisioning is the longer-term play, using behavioural signals to route each shopper to the message most likely to address the actual reason for abandonment.
The honest implication for most mid-market merchants is to start with the basics before adding AI complexity. Clear checkout pricing, a tested email sequence, and a compelling returns policy will close more carts than a sophisticated model built on shallow data.
Source: practicalecommerce.com
