Cart Abandonment Software: 16 Options and the 3 Cuts That Kill Most of Them

For a store already on Shopify, Omnisend at $16 a month and Klaviyo are the usual picks, while CartStack at $39 a month does recovery and nothing else. For a solo seller whose storefront is one checkout link, a checkout platform like Sellfy, SamCart or CartMango has the feature built in.

Cart abandonment software emails or texts shoppers who start a checkout and leave without paying, and the options diverge on what tells the tool a checkout was abandoned. Email platforms listen for a cart event from Shopify, WooCommerce or Wix, so a lone checkout link never triggers them. Every price below came from the vendor’s own pricing page.

Somebody added your product to a cart, typed their email, then closed the tab. That happens to roughly 7 in 10 people who get that far, which is why an entire software category exists to chase them.

What surprised me is how few of those tools are built for the job. Of the 12 products Google’s first page offers, 9 are email marketing platforms with a recovery automation tucked inside.

The group that does recovery natively is missing from page 1 altogether.

So I read all of them, opened every pricing page, and cut the field down with 3 rules you can check against your own setup. You will finish knowing whether this is a purchase or a setting you already own.

Key Takeaways

• Page 1 of Google names 12 products as cart abandonment software, and 9 of them are email platforms rather than recovery tools.
• Most of those 9 trigger off a store platform’s “cart abandoned” event, so a single checkout link never fires them.
• Google’s AI Overview for this search says Omnisend starts at $45 a month and ActiveCampaign at $29. Their own pricing pages say $16 and $15.
• CartStack, the one dedicated tool on page 1, starts at $39 a month for 100 orders, which is $468 a year.
• Recovery usually sits one plan above the entry tier, so the cheapest advertised price is rarely the one that includes it.
• Sellfy will not record an abandoned cart at all unless the shopper ticks a marketing opt-in box first, and its own help doc says so.

Worth knowing which of your leaks actually cost you money before you spend on this one. Plenty of solo sellers lose more to pricing and positioning than to abandoned checkouts, and the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the 5 that come up most often.

Start here: the 16 real options

Counting every product named as cart abandonment software across the pages on Google’s first screen gives 12. The honest field is 16, because page 1 leaves out the one category a digital seller is most likely already paying for.

Here are all 16, grouped by what they really are.

Email platforms with a recovery automation (9): Omnisend, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, MailerLite, Brevo, Mailchimp, Drip and SmartrMail. These are marketing tools first. Recovery is one automation among dozens.

A dedicated recovery tool (1): CartStack. It does not send your newsletters. It watches your checkout and chases the people who leave.

A WordPress plugin (1): Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce, from Tyche Softwares. There is a free version too, Abandoned Cart Lite, with more than 20,000 active installs and a 4.1 star rating on the WordPress plugin directory.

A cart you install yourself (1): Snipcart, which you add to a site you already built.

Checkout platforms that ship recovery inside the product (4): Sellfy, SamCart, ThriveCart and CartMango. Not one of these appears on page 1 for this search, and all 4 have a documented cart abandonment feature. I run CartMango, so read its row in every table below with that in mind.

The 5 kinds split cleanly on one question, which is what tells the software a checkout was abandoned. For 10 of the 16 that answer is a store platform you have to be running already, and the 4 checkout platforms that answer it for themselves are the group page 1 never lists.

The top-ranking page frames the whole decision in one sentence. EmailToolTester’s guide tells you: “You’ve got two broad choices: the default email service on your ecommerce platform (like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Wix), or email software with abandoned shopping cart features.”

Read that again if you sell digital products. Both choices start with a store platform. Neither branch exists for someone whose entire storefront is one checkout link and a PDF.

Cut 1: drop any cart abandonment software that cannot see your checkout

The criterion for Cut 1 is mechanical: can the tool find out that a checkout was abandoned without you running a store platform? An abandoned cart tool needs something to tell it a cart was abandoned. On Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Wix, the platform fires an event when a shopper adds items and leaves. Every one of those 9 is an email tool, and an email tool learns about an abandoned cart from an integration rather than from watching your site itself.

With no store platform there is no event, and with no event there is nothing to send.

This kills 10 of the 16. All 9 email platforms lose their trigger. Abandoned Cart Pro dies with them, because it is a WooCommerce plugin and cannot run without WooCommerce, which in turn needs your own WordPress hosting.

ActiveCampaign documents the limit inside its own guide to this category, in the cons section for its own product: the product blocks that put the abandoned item back in front of the shopper only work if you have a Shopify or WooCommerce store.

That leaves 6 standing: CartStack, Snipcart, Sellfy, SamCart, ThriveCart and CartMango.

If you do run a Shopify or WooCommerce store, this cut does not apply to you and all 10 come straight back. Read the pricing section below anyway, then pick between the email platform you already pay for and a dedicated tool. The rest of this post is for the seller whose checkout is a link.

There is a version of this cut that goes the other way, and it is worth saying plainly so nobody feels tricked. If your checkout platform can push an abandoned checkout into your email tool, through a native integration or through Make or Zapier, then an email platform is back in play. That is a real path and plenty of sellers run it.

It is still not a reason to pay for 2 things. The push has to come from your checkout either way, which means your checkout already knows the checkout was abandoned. Whether it emails the person itself or hands the job to another tool is a wiring choice, not a capability you were missing.

Cut 2: drop anything that costs more than it can plausibly bring back

Now the money, and this is where the published numbers stop agreeing with each other, so read every figure below against the vendors’ own pages rather than against a roundup. Google’s AI Overview for this exact search makes 2 pricing claims to start with. It says Omnisend “plans start at $45 per month” and ActiveCampaign “plans start at $29 per month”.

Omnisend’s own pricing page shows a free plan at $0, then Standard at $16 a month for 500 contacts. Pay 3 months upfront and the same plan displays at $11.20. ActiveCampaign’s own pricing page shows Starter at $15 a month for 1,000 contacts on annual billing.

Both wrong numbers are real prices. They belong to other companies, and both of those companies appear on a page ranking for this same search.

ActiveCampaign’s own roundup, which sits on page 1 and carries a June 2023 date, answers 4 pricing questions in a row.

Klaviyo: “Their entry-level plan starts at $45 a month and allows you 1000 contacts.” Omnisend: “$16 a month and allows up to 500 contacts.” ActiveCampaign: “$15/month.” CartStack: “can start at $29 a month.”

So $45 is a Klaviyo number and $29 is a CartStack number. I cannot tell you how they ended up attached to the wrong vendors, and I am not going to guess. What I can tell you is that all 4 figures sit on one page-1 article, and the summary a searcher reads pairs 2 of them with the wrong companies.

The CartStack figure has a second problem. It is out of date. CartStack now prices by orders processed per month, and the cheapest Basic plan is $39 a month for up to 100 orders, rising to $119 at 500 orders and $219 at 1,000. That 2023 article still says $29, and the article is what page 1 shows.

Klaviyo’s plan builder currently opens at $45 a month for 1,500 profiles, on top of a free plan capped at 250 profiles. So the $45 is live and correct, just pointed at the wrong company.

What survives this cut depends on your volume. CartStack at $39 a month is $468 a year, and that is the floor, before you sell anything. Snipcart takes 2% of every transaction, and below $1,000 a month in sales that 2% is replaced by a flat $20 monthly fee, which on $500 of sales works out at 4%.

For a seller doing 20 orders a month on a $27 product, $468 a year is most of the revenue those recovered carts would ever produce. Cut 2 kills Snipcart outright for anyone who is not already building their own store, and prices CartStack out for anyone under a few hundred orders a month. That leaves 4 for a solo seller, Sellfy, SamCart, ThriveCart and CartMango, with CartStack still in play at higher volume.

Cut 3: drop the entry plan of anything that keeps recovery a tier higher

Cut 3 looks at plans, not whole products. It is the cut that quietly ruins most price comparisons.

Every survivor advertises a headline price. On 2 of the 4 that headline price does not include cart abandonment, SamCart is the exception, and ThriveCart I could not check.

Sellfy’s cheapest plan is $29 a month. Its own pricing page lists cart abandonment under Business at $79 a month and Premium at $159, and not under Starter. Sellfy’s help documentation says the same thing in plainer words: the data is only collected “with the Business, Premium or Custom plan”.

CartMango’s cheapest plan is $10 a year. Cart abandonment is not on it. The feature sits on the $20 Gold plan alongside upsells and downsells, so $10 is the wrong CartMango number to put in any comparison about this feature.

ActiveCampaign is worth naming here even though Cut 1 already removed it, because it sets the same trap by a different route. Its $15 Starter plan is capped at 5 actions per automation. A typical recovery sequence, say 3 emails with 2 waits and a condition between them, is already past that, so the advertised entry price buys you a plan that cannot run the thing you came for.

SamCart is the exception among the survivors. Cart abandonment is on its entry Core plan at $79 a month. Order bumps and 1-click upsells are the features it holds back for the $199 Pro plan.

Two entry plans go here, Sellfy Starter and CartMango Silver. Both products stay in the running on a higher plan. ActiveCampaign’s $15 Starter belongs in the same paragraph even though Cut 1 already removed it, because it is the clearest example of an advertised price that cannot run the job. ThriveCart stays unresolved: I could not read its current tiering on its own site, so whether it gates recovery behind a higher licence is unknown rather than cleared. What is left is a shorter and more honest set of prices, which is what the table below uses.

What is left, and how to pick between them

After 3 cuts, 4 products survive for a seller whose storefront is a checkout link: Sellfy, SamCart, ThriveCart and CartMango. Two more belong in the table for anyone who does run a store platform, since that reader was never inside Cut 1’s rule to begin with. CartStack is the dedicated option, and Omnisend stands in for the 9 email platforms Cut 1 ruled out, because it is the one named on more of the page-1 roundups than any other and it has a free tier to start on.

Each row below names the basis the vendor itself publishes, because 4 of them sell by the month, 1 only by the year and 1 as a one-time licence. The 1-year column is annualized from those published monthly rates rather than lifted from an annual price card. Over a year, CartMango’s Gold plan costs $20, Omnisend’s Standard plan costs $192, CartStack’s cheapest plan costs $468, and Sellfy Business and SamCart Core both cost $948. That spread is not a like-for-like comparison, because the row that fits you is decided by the setup you already run rather than by which tool recovers more.

CartMango is my own product, which is why it sits last and why its catch column names what it cannot do yet. Order bumps are on all 3 CartMango tiers, including the $10 Silver plan. What the $20 Gold plan adds is cart abandonment plus upsells and downsells. The comparison worth making is with SamCart, which puts recovery on its $79 Core plan and holds order bumps and 1-click upsells for the $199 Pro plan. ThriveCart’s row has no dollar figure because I could not read its current price on its own site during this research, and I would rather leave a cell honest than fill it from a roundup.

The pattern in that table is the answer for most people. If you already pay for a checkout, recovery is either in your plan or 1 tier up, and 1 tier up is almost always cheaper than a second subscription. Our guide to shopping cart software covers how the 3 kinds of cart differ if you are still choosing one.

Most buyers pick differently. They cut on recovery rate, read that abandoned cart emails bring back 10% or 30% of lost sales, choose the tool with the biggest number on its homepage, and pay.

That criterion cannot be checked. Nobody can promise you a recovery rate, because it moves with your price, your traffic source, your consent rate and how close the shopper was to paying. The vendors quoting 30% are quoting their best customers.

Sellers who actually run these emails are blunter about it. In a thread on r/ecommerce about why abandonment sits above 70%, a seller put the realistic ceiling at “about 10% of abandoned carts”. Another replied that it is more like “15-20% max if you’re being realistic about it”, and added the useful bit: the ones worth chasing are the people who reached payment and bounced on cost. A third was harsher still, saying most of those carts were never going to convert whatever you do.

So cut on ownership instead. Ask whether you are about to pay twice for something your checkout already does, and leave the recovery-rate question alone until you know the answer. At $468 a year against $20 a year for a plan that includes it, the recovery rates would have to differ enormously to close that gap.

One more objection comes up more than any other, and it stops plenty of sellers switching a recovery sequence on at all. They worry the reminders will annoy people and cost them subscribers.

I can only offer my own list as evidence here, and it comes from my email tool rather than from CartMango. The number still surprised me at the time.

In April 2022 I started putting a pitch in every single email I sent. My unsubscribe rate before that change ran between 0.1% and 0.3%. After it, over months of sending, it ran between 0.1% and 0.3%. Identical. Nobody wrote in to complain that I was selling too much.

My list is not a study, and yours may behave differently. But the fear that 2 or 3 well-timed reminders will burn your audience is worth testing against your own numbers rather than assuming it.

The cut most guides skip: none of this fires without consent

Every roundup I read for this post treats cart abandonment as a technical feature. Turn it on, emails go out, money comes back. Not one of them mentions the step that decides whether anything gets recorded in the first place.

Sellfy’s help documentation spells it out. For its cart abandonment feature to record anything, 2 things have to happen: the customer has to enter their email at checkout, and the customer has to tick the newsletter subscription box. Sellfy’s own words are that an abandoned cart is created when the shopper “gives consent or checks the box to receive news, offers and product updates”.

Miss the tick box and the cart is not abandoned in any sense your software can see. It never existed.

ThriveCart comes at the same problem from the legal end. Its support article on cart abandonment says that “if an email address is captured before consent is given, or without a clear legal basis, then sending abandoned cart emails may not meet GDPR requirements”. ThriveCart lets you switch the collection off globally, for EU visitors only, or per individual product.

So this feature reaches far fewer people than the marketing suggests. The software chases the subset of people who left an email address and agreed to hear from you. That subset is far smaller than 70% of your traffic, and every recovery-rate claim you read is a percentage of the smaller number.

No product leaves the list at this cut. What changes is what you should expect from whatever survived. Whatever survived the first 3 cuts still only works on shoppers who opted in, so a tool promising to recover a third of your lost carts is quietly assuming a consent rate nobody publishes.

The practical version: go and look at where the opt-in tick box sits in your own checkout before you compare any 2 tools on recovery rate. It is doing more work than the software is.

The second thing worth fixing before you buy anything is the checkout itself. Fewer fields, the full price visible before the last step, and a payment method people already have on their phone. Our order bump guide and the walkthrough on how to create a sales page both cover the parts of a checkout that make people leave in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

How do you track abandoned carts?

Your checkout or store platform records the session when a shopper enters an email and starts paying, then marks it abandoned if no payment arrives inside a set window. On Shopify or WooCommerce this fires a platform event that a connected email tool can listen for. On a hosted checkout like Sellfy, SamCart or CartMango the platform tracks it internally and lists the carts in your dashboard. If your checkout does not track it, no external tool can see it either.

What is a good cart abandonment rate?

The figure everyone quotes is about 70%, and different trackers land on slightly different versions of it. Baymard Institute puts the average documented rate at 70.22%, while our own guide to abandoned cart email templates cites Statista at 70.19%.

That gap is the useful part. Baymard’s number is an average of 50 separate studies whose individual results run from 56.82% up to 84.27%, so any single headline figure is a midpoint of a very wide spread. There is no one good rate to hit. Compare your own rate against your own rate last quarter, and treat anything inside that range as normal.

Are abandoned cart emails legal?

In the United States, yes, with conditions. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guidance covers any message whose primary purpose is commercial, which an abandoned cart email is. That means accurate headers, an honest subject line, your real postal address, and a working opt-out you honor within 10 business days. Penalties run to $53,088 per email.

Under GDPR the bar is higher, because you need a lawful basis for holding the address at all. That is why some platforms will only record a cart after the shopper opts in.

How do you reduce a cart abandonment rate?

Remove the reasons people stop. Show the full price before the final step, cut the number of form fields, offer a payment method people already have on their phone, and do not ask anyone to create an account to buy a PDF. These fixes cost nothing and they work on every shopper, where a recovery email only reaches the ones who left an address and consented.

Is there free cart abandonment software?

Yes, with limits. Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce is free from the WordPress plugin directory and has over 20,000 active installs, but it needs a WooCommerce store. Omnisend, Klaviyo, Brevo and MailerLite all run free tiers, though the caps are low and the recovery automation still needs a store platform to trigger it.

Do I need cart abandonment software if I sell 1 digital product?

Usually not as a separate purchase. A single checkout link has no multi-item cart, so most of this category has nothing to read. Check your checkout platform’s feature list first, because recovery is standard on the digital-seller platforms and typically sits 1 plan above the entry tier.

What this decision is really about

The cuts all point the same way. Cart abandonment software is a product built for stores with catalogues, and a solo digital seller is usually buying a smaller version of something their checkout already ships.

I built CartMango because that was the pattern I kept running into: creators paying for 4 tools to do what 1 checkout should do, then paying a platform fee on top. CartMango puts cart abandonment on its $20 a year Gold plan alongside upsells and downsells, with order bumps included on every tier from $10 up. It takes no cut of your sales, and it is free until the beta ends in October 2026.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

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• Online store for digital products comparing 3 store types on a real $10 sale
• SamCart alternatives if the $79 a month entry plan is the thing stopping you
• Selling digital products without a website if the checkout link is your whole storefront