The Shopify Checkout Abandonment Journey allows you to automatically engage shoppers who begin the checkout process but leave before completing their purchase. By leveraging real-time behavioral data from your Shopify store, this journey enables you to deliver timely, personalized email or SMS messages to encourage contacts to return and complete their order.
Using Journey Hub, you can tailor messaging based on the products left in a shopper’s checkout, test different engagement strategies, and create a seamless path back to purchase. This helps recover otherwise lost revenue while delivering a more relevant and connected customer experience.
The guide below outlines some of the basic setup and strategy considerations for your checkout abandonment journey.
Initial Setup
The initial setup allows you to determine how contacts enter and exit a journey based on your specific goals.
How a Contact Enters a Journey
Contacts enter a Shopify Checkout Abandonment Journey when they land on the checkout page but do not complete their purchase within the defined abandonment timeframe.
Listrak captures this event even if the shopper has not entered an email address or phone number, as long as they were previously identified in an earlier session. This enables broader identification and allows you to recover more shoppers compared to standard checkout abandonment, which requires contact information to be entered before qualifying.
How Checkout Data is Processed
When a checkout is abandoned, key data is captured through the Shopify integration and used to personalize messaging and power journey execution.
This includes:
Contact information (email address or phone number) used to identify and message the shopper.
Checkout details, such as items, pricing, and cart contents.
Session and behavioral data that determines when the abandonment event is triggered.
Journey Hub evaluates this data in real time to ensure messaging remains accurate and relevant. Contacts who no longer meet the criteria, such as those who complete their purchase, are automatically removed from the journey to prevent unnecessary messaging.
Accessing Journey Hub
Navigate to Automation > Journey Hub Journey.
Click New Journey.
Click Start from Scratch.
Select Checkout Abandonment (Shopifyplus).
Give your journey a unique name.
Adjusting the Entry Criteria
Click on the entry step on the canvas to adjust the properties in the side panel.
Select the merchant associated with the abandonment campaign if not already selected.
Set your session timeout. The timeout determines how long a contact must be inactive on your website before a checkout is considered abandoned.
Listrak uses session timeouts to prioritize which abandonment journey a contact should enter when multiple journeys are possible. The journey with the highest priority is configured with the shortest session timeout, ensuring contacts are routed to the most critical abandonment event. For example, a high-priority journey might have a session timeout of 30 minutes, while a medium-priority journey might have a timeout of 40 minutes, and a lower-priority journey might have a timeout of 50 minutes. This flexibility allows businesses to customize their journey strategies based on their specific needs.
Next, customize the re-entry rules by selecting how frequently contacts can re-enter the campaign. By default, a contact is eligible to enter a campaign any time a checkout is abandoned.
💡 Use the custom re-entry frequency to limit how often a contact is eligible to receive the Checkout Abandonment campaign. Consider adding a re-entry frequency for at least the length of the checkout abandonment series.
Then, customize the entry prevention rules, which prevent a contact from entering the current journey if they are already a participant in another journey.
Configuring Exit Events
Click on the exit event on the canvas to edit the properties.
An exit event determines what must happen in order for a customer to exit a journey. If no exit events are configured or customers do not take the specified action they will naturally exit the journey at the end of their path.
Do you need an exit event? Exit events are not required, but you should consider the ultimate goal of your journey flow and if there are reasons a contact should no longer receive messages.
A common exit events for Checkout Abandonment is the Purchase event. A checkout abandonment campaign aims to encourage a purchase, so customers should not receive additional messages after completing the purchase.
Customizing Your Journey
Configure the Flow
Now that you have determined how a contact becomes eligible to enter or exit the journey, you can determine the experience they will have by customizing paths based on past purchase history, messaging channel, and more.
Below are a few of the strategic considerations you may make when configuring your journey.
Actions
Coupons: You can include a coupon to incentivize a contact to complete the checkout process. The coupon action uses Listrak's coupon pools to display static or unique coupons. You can include a single or multiple coupons in a single journey.
Exit: Use the exit action to stop contacts in a specific path from continuing through the journey.
Webhook: A webhook can be configured to send information to a third-party system such as sending information to a system that manages your catalogs. Learn more about setting up a webhook.
Data Management: Use a data management step to write data into a contact's profile or subscribe a contact to an email or SMS list. Profile field data can be useful for future segmentation. Learn more about setting a profile field.
Wait Step
Use wait steps to pause a contact before they receive additional messages.
Messages
Add messages from the following channels, learn more about configuring each type here:
Email
You can design an email in HTML or using Listrak Composer.
When designing messages in Composer you can use two different methods to create the design of the carted items:
Using the built-in Composer element: An easy drag-and-drop configuration for quick configuration.
Using Handlebars: A code-based design option with additional flexibility
💡 Handlebars can be added to saved content components to easily update the design in the future.
SMS
If you are creating an SMS or multi-channel message, mobile carriers require additional compliance for messages. T-Mobile requires stricter opt-in than other carriers, but all carriers require contacts to specifically be notified that their SMS opt-in includes cart reminders in order to allow a message that contains a cart link. You can use the Subscription Split to identify an abandoner's carrier and if they have opted-in and tailor a message accordingly.
Learn more about SMS Cart Compliance requirements.
Consult with your Listrak team to determine what type of consent is being collected and your legal team to determine differences in messaging strategies.
Web Push
App Push
💡 A contact must have opted-in to the specific channel to receive messages in the channel.
Message Delivery Settings
When configuring an email or SMS message, you can set turn on the message delivery settings in the Properties Panel. Enabling this setting allows you to limit the time range for when a message is sent.
You can also enable Time Zone Optimization to adjust the time to a customer's location based on their IP address, if sending an email message, or the area code, for an SMS message.
⚠️ If a contact takes action outside of the specified timeframe, they will pause their progress through the journey until they reach the specified timeframe.
Decision Splits
Most decision splits can be placed anywhere in the journey to customize a customer's experience as they progress through the journey. Below are a few of the strategic ways decision splits can be used in a Product Browse Abandonment Journey. Once you have determined the strategy you would like to customize, learn more about configuring your decision splits.
💡 Use the multi-path option to create a fully customized experience for different groups of purchasers.
📦 Purchase History Split: This split can customize a contact's path based on their past order history. Message purchasers differently than prospects, for example providing a coupon earlier.
☑️ Subscription Split: This split can be used to customize a contact's path based on how, when, or if they are subscribed to a specific list. You can maintain CASL compliance by ensuring your abandoners are currently subscribed to your master list before receiving messages.
🛒 Cart Details Split: This split can be used to customize an abandoner's path based on the items in their cart. You can use an item's properties, e.g. sale status, or overall cart details, e.g. cart total, in the split. Send different coupons to higher vs lower value abandoners or stop a contact from receiving a coupon if a product is ineligible
✉️ Engagement Split: This split can change a contact's path if they have engaged with a previous email or SMS message. Use this type of split to send additional messages to those who have shown interest.
🔀 Random Split: The random split can be used to test different components of a campaign by sending a percentage of customers one experience and the rest another experience. Use the random split to test how many messages to include, which subject lines have impact on open rates, or test how long to wait between messages.
📱 Channel Affinity Split: This split can be used to prioritize the messaging channel used to communicate with a customer.
Activating the Journey
Once all messages have been created and the paths established, you are ready to activate the journey so that contacts can start receiving the new path and messages.
To activate, select the Activate button in the top right corner.
💡 Helpful Tips
Journey must be live to activate:
Checkout abandon events will continue routing through your existing Cart Abandonment Journey until a Checkout Abandonment Journey is published. Once activated, the two journeys will split as intended, ensuring your current setup remains unchanged until you opt in.Reporting is not yet segmented:
While performance metrics are available within individual journeys, Checkout Abandonment is not currently broken out separately from Cart Abandonment in aggregated reporting views.SMS Compliance Reminder:
Checkout Abandonment uses the same underlying data and event structure as Cart Abandonment. As a result, you should apply the same SMS consent rules and messaging best practices when configuring this journey.