What is Abandoned Cart SMS?

Abandoned Cart SMS is a recovery tactic that sends text messages to shoppers who added products to their online cart but left without completing the purchase. It's a pre-purchase intervention designed to bring customers back to complete their transaction.

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest revenue leaks in ecommerce. The average cart abandonment rate across all industries is approximately 70% — meaning 7 out of 10 shoppers who add items to their cart never check out. On mobile, the rate is even higher at 85%.

Abandoned cart SMS is distinct from post-purchase SMS flows (which engage customers after they've bought) and from email cart recovery (which serves the same purpose but through a slower, lower-attention channel). SMS cart recovery outperforms email on speed — texts are read within minutes, not hours — and on urgency, making it particularly effective for time-sensitive products or limited inventory.

An abandoned cart SMS flow typically works in three steps:

1. Trigger: When a customer adds items to their cart and leaves without checking out, the event is captured (usually via Shopify or your ecommerce platform).

2. Delay: A short waiting period (typically 30-60 minutes) gives the customer a chance to return on their own before the message fires. This prevents annoying customers who simply got distracted for a few minutes.

3. Message: An SMS is sent reminding the customer what they left behind, often with a direct link back to their cart or — with text-to-buy — an option to complete the purchase by simply replying to the text.

Most abandoned cart recovery tools default to email first, with SMS as a fallback for non-openers. This stacked approach works — the abandoned cart text message catches customers who didn't engage with email — but it still funnels everyone through the same link-based checkout.

The text-to-buy approach to cart recovery is fundamentally different from link-based recovery. Traditional abandoned cart SMS sends customers back to the same checkout that already failed once. Text-to-buy cart recovery lets them complete the purchase in the text thread itself — removing the exact friction that caused the abandonment in the first place.

At a 70% abandonment rate, cart recovery represents the largest single revenue opportunity for most ecommerce brands. Even recovering 5-10% of abandoned carts can meaningfully impact monthly revenue.

SMS dramatically outperforms email for cart recovery because of speed and attention. Email open rates average 30.7%, and even when recipients open and click, email click-to-conversion sits at 9.0% — meaning most email recipients never act. SMS has a 98% open rate and is typically read within 3 minutes. According to 2025 data analyzing 150,000+ brands, automated messages represent just 2% of total email sends but generate 30% of total revenue. Abandoned cart and welcome messages alone account for 76% of all automation-generated orders. Automated email generates $2.87 per send (16x campaigns), while automated SMS generates $0.74 per send (5x campaigns) — both dramatically outperforming broadcast messages.

The conversion comparison matters — but only when you measure it the same way. Industry reports often cite click-to-conversion rates: 9.0% for email and 0.97% for SMS. Those numbers only count people who already clicked a link. Most recipients never do. The metric that actually matters is total conversion — orders divided by messages sent. By that measure, standard SMS campaigns convert at roughly 0.12%, and SMS automations (including cart recovery) convert at roughly 0.5%. An abandoned cart email recovery rate of 5-10% is considered strong — most brands fall well below that.

Text-to-buy changes the math entirely by removing the checkout friction that caused the abandonment. Many mobile shoppers abandon because the checkout process is cumbersome — small screens, form fields, payment entry, address typing. When recovery happens via text-to-buy (stored payment, reply to confirm), there is no link, no page load, and no checkout to navigate. The reply is the purchase. AudienceTap brands see 5.5% total conversion on text-to-buy drops — 46x higher than standard SMS campaigns — and $2.01 in revenue per message sent.