BigCommerce abandoned cart: How to recover lost sales in 2026

You spend time and money driving visitors to your ecommerce store. They browse your products, add items to their shopping carts, and head to checkout. Then, they simply leave. Sounds familiar? We’re sure it does.

Shopping cart abandonment is a massive problem for online retailers, and it represents billions in lost revenue every year. It’s frustrating to see those potential sales slip away at the last moment, when you were so sure you had them. However, there’s a bright side to that. Those lost sales aren’t gone forever, and you can get some of them back.

Setting up BigCommerce abandoned cart emails helps you bring those shoppers back to complete their purchases. By reaching out at the right time, you can recover revenue that would otherwise be left on the table and significantly improve your conversion rates. Here’s all you need to know.

What is BigCommerce abandoned cart recovery?

BigCommerce abandoned cart recovery is the process of re-engaging visitors who add items to their shopping carts but leave your website before checking out. This strategy mostly relies on automated emails or SMS messages to remind these potential customers about what they left behind.

The process behind it is simple: 

1. You set up an automation workflow in the BigCommerce native feature or your selected ESP (for example, Omnisend)
2. A shopper adds some items to their cart, and then suddenly abandons it
3. Your BigCommerce store triggers the already-configured automation workflow to remind them to finalize their purchase.

The goal here is to remind the customer that they’ve recently been shopping with you and left without completing the purchase, address any hesitations they may have, and maybe offer an incentive to finalize the order.

Why abandoned cart emails matter for BigCommerce stores

Recovering lost sales makes a huge difference for ecommerce stores, and abandoned cart recovery is one of the ways to do so. If you ignore this workflow, you may be looking at a significant portion of revenue just left behind. Setting up an abandoned cart automation takes only a few minutes, and it can save you hundreds or thousands in lost revenue every month.

If you don’t want to focus just on abandoned cart emails, you can also come up with a different form of reminder email. The sky is the limit. For example, one of Omnisend’s clients took a rather unique approach that resulted in big numbers.

This approach is a perfect illustration of how reaching customers with the right message at the right time can benefit your bottom line. If they bought the cake, there was probably a reason for that, and reminding them about yourself the next time that event comes up is an excellent strategy that removes the burden of looking for another cake provider.

How cart abandonment affects revenue

It’s completely normal for a large portion of your visitors to leave without buying. Ignoring these near-misses, however, means you’re actively walking away from customers you have already spent marketing dollars to acquire. It’s just sabotage, nothing else.

Think about the time, effort, and budget you dedicate to driving traffic to your BigCommerce store. When a high percentage of that hard-earned traffic abandons their cart, your return on investment takes a dip. Recapturing even a small fraction of these lost sales can drastically improve your store’s profitability.

The role of email in cart recovery

Email is the most effective channel for bringing distracted shoppers back to your checkout page. It gives you a direct line to your customer’s inbox and allows you to send highly relevant and personalized messages. 

Unlike broad retargeting ads, an abandoned cart email speaks directly to the individual about the specific products they already showed interest in. You can easily include product images, descriptions, and a link back to their waiting cart. This makes it incredibly easy for them to finish their order, and provides an effortless experience that other marketing channels struggle to match.

As a bonus tip, some more marketing-savvy people often abandon their carts on purpose and wait for you to remind them with a discount code. This means that without said workflow in place, there’s a chance you’re losing guaranteed customers.

How to set up abandoned cart email campaigns in BigCommerce

As you may now know, getting your automated recovery campaigns up and running is an essential step for your store. You generally have a couple of options for getting this done. Let’s look at the two main ways to approach this setup.

Using native BigCommerce abandoned cart features

BigCommerce includes a built-in Abandoned Cart Saver feature for stores on specific paid plans. This tool lets you automatically send up to three emails to shoppers who leave items behind.

While it’s a helpful starting point, this native functionality has some notable limitations. The email design options are somewhat restricted, making it harder to perfectly match your brand’s look and feel. You also cannot build complex automation workflows or segment your audience for more personalized messaging.

Setting up automation with advanced tools

To get the most from your cart recovery efforts, connecting a dedicated marketing platform is the way to go. Omnisend seamlessly integrates with BigCommerce and allows you to build highly personalized, automated workflows. If you want, you can even build flows with splits to see which one performs better.

With an intuitive interface that is approved by experts and newbies alike, you can quickly add dynamic product recommendations and A/B test your messages. You can even combine your emails with global SMS marketing to reach your audience directly on their phones.

You can start using all of these ecommerce-focused features immediately on the forever-free plan. As your store grows, Omnisend provides an excellent set of features at user-oriented prices compared to competitors. Also, Omnisend users see an average ROI of $79 for $1 spent.

BigCommerce abandoned cart recovery strategies that work

Setting up a basic reminder is a good start, but you can definitely do better than rely on a single message. To get the highest return on your marketing efforts, you need to come up with an approach that will guide your visitors back to checkout, where you want them to be. Here are some of the most effective strategies to recover those lost sales.

1. Send a sequence of recovery emails

A single email can easily get lost in a crowded inbox or arrive when your customer is too busy to get on their phone. Instead, send a series of timed messages to give your shoppers multiple chances to convert. Just don’t push it too hard with 15 abandoned cart reminders. Stick to three:

• One hour later: Give them a gentle nudge and ask whether they had any technical difficulties that prevented them from finalizing the purchase.
• 24 hours later: This time around, you can highlight some of the benefits of the product in question if applicable.
• 48 hours later: For the final reminder, you can try giving them a timed discount for the cart to see if a financial incentive combined with urgency would do the trick.

2. Use urgency and incentives

Some shoppers are starting to get the hang of the entire email marketing industry, and they might abandon their carts purposefully so they can get a better deal two days later. There’s also a portion of those who honestly get distracted, and an additional incentive makes them come back.

You can try offering a limited-time discount code or free shipping for orders completed within the next 24 hours or less. You can also note that items in their cart are selling fast to create a natural fear of missing out. Just make sure you don’t give massive discounts left and right since that could hurt your profit margins over time.

To avoid that, you can offer discounts to first-time buyers only or apply them exclusively to high-value carts.

3. Personalize your messages

Generic messages rarely capture attention, so you want your emails to feel tailored to every individual buyer. Using dynamic content allows you to automatically pull the exact product images, names, and prices from a shopper’s abandoned cart directly into the email.

Also, you can use this email not only to remind them about their cart, but also to increase their cart value by offering related products. However, that should be done with caution, and we recommend A/B testing this before sticking with it. It may be perceived as excessive selling and add even more pressure to the buyer.

4. Combine email with SMS reminders

While email alone provides significant value, you can make it even better by pairing it with SMS. SMS is a channel that comes with a 90%-98% open rate, so it’s highly likely that your message will be seen. Just keep in mind that these numbers can work against you just as well if you spam them with irrelevant and excessively frequent messages.

With Omnisend, you can build an efficient omnichannel strategy and do it using an intuitive dashboard. Also, it comes with global SMS marketing, whereas many other competitors often restrict text messaging to just the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Omnisend doesn’t come with such restrictions, and you can reach your customers wherever they happen to be.

Common mistakes to avoid in BigCommerce abandoned cart emails

Setting up an automated sequence is a great first step, but some choices or errors can quickly ruin your chances of recovering sales. Shoppers get lots of messages every day, so you need to make sure you stand out in the crowd. We’ve mapped out the most frequent pitfalls you might encounter and exactly how to fix them.

Sending only one email

With email marketing, the best thing you can do is focus on sending the optimal amount of messages: not too few, and not too many.  A single message rarely captures someone’s attention, especially if they’re busy.

This single email will most likely get buried in their inbox, and they won’t ever see what you had to say. Use a sequence of two or three messages to give yourself a fighting chance. It will drastically improve your open rates and recovered revenue.

Poor timing and frequency

If you send a message too quickly, you’ll seem needy and aggressive. Too late, and your customer may have already bought what they needed at a competitor’s store. You won’t be able to define the perfect balance right off the bat, but once you start testing, you’ll get the timing right for your specific audience.

As a benchmark, you can start by sending your first reminder one hour after the abandonment, then follow up 24 hours later, and send a final message once 48 hours have passed. Then, optimize and adjust from there.

Lack of personalization

One of the sloppiest things marketers can do is send generic, identical mass emails to everyone, expecting great results. Recipients don’t usually respond to communications that don’t feel tailored to them.

True personalization doesn’t start with using their first name and doesn’t end at “this is just for you.” If you want your emails to be truly personal, you need to create different abandoned cart flows for different categories of products, or for each individual listing if your selection is small.

This way, you can make sure that your abandoned cart emails will be far more personalized and could improve your conversion rates significantly.

Ready to recover more abandoned carts?

Cart abandonment doesn’t have to mean permanently lost revenue. By setting up automated recovery campaigns, you can gently guide your visitors back to checkout and see a direct, measurable impact on your bottom line.

Omnisend seamlessly integrates with BigCommerce to help you recapture these sales through highly personalized BigCommerce email and SMS sequences. Our intuitive interface is powerful without being clunky, allowing you to build automated workflows without the steep learning curve. We’ve done the heavy lifting ourselves, so you can focus on your business, not the technical overhead.

What’s more, Omnisend customers get $79 back for every $1 spent, which is only logical considering the feature availability and pricing flexibility that grows with you, not against you. Cherry on top, you can start using all of these ecommerce-focused tools right now on our free plan without any commitment. Plus, our award-winning 24/7 customer support is always there to help you succeed.

BigCommerce abandoned cart FAQs