How to Use AI for Abandoned Carts + Best AI Tools & Tips [2025]

Cart abandonment is a universal issue for all eCommerce entrepreneurs.

After all those efforts and investments into marketing and ads, you earn those website visitors. And when they leave your site with products added to their carts, it hurts — financially, too.

On a positive note, AI’s learning, analysis, and automation capabilities can be leveraged to tackle this issue.

In this blog post, we’ll share insights on how to use AI for abandoned carts and maximize your profits. We’ll also help you with the tools and tips that you may implement to get the best out of AI.

Let’s get started!

What is cart abandonment in eCommerce?

Cart abandonment is the event when a customer adds an item to the cart, but for some reason, leaves your website without completing the checkout.

In other words, you got a potential customer interested in your product, but couldn’t get a conversion. If you don’t have a proper action plan and strategy to tackle such scenarios, you may end up losing a lot of money.

On average, about 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts. That’s a lot, right?

Considering its impact, a cart abandonment rate is considered one of the key metrics for the success of an eCommerce store. A cart abandonment rate is the percentage of website visitors who add item(s) to the cart and then leave your website.

The lower your cart abandonment rate, the better your conversion rate — and consequently, better revenue and profits.

To tackle the challenge of cart abandonment, you must thoroughly understand the general reasons that lead to cart abandonment. Then, analyze which specific reasons are applicable in your business.

Why do eCommerce shoppers abandon their carts?

Now, let’s discuss the key reasons for cart abandonments in eCommerce.

We already discussed about 70% cart abandonment rate found in the report by Baymard Institute

. The same report has further explained the reasons for cart abandonments.

1. Extra Costs: Customers find the extra costs (such as shipping, taxes, and other fees) to be too high.

2. Long Delivery Time: Customers feel the delivery time is too slow. Thus, customers may switch to a competitor with a faster delivery option.

3. Payment Security Concern: Customers feel a security concern before inserting their payment information.

4. Account Requirement: Website requiring the customers to create an account, mandatorily. In other words, the customer left the cart as there was no option to checkout as a guest.

5. Checkout Flow Issue: Customers find the checkout process to be lengthy and complicated.

6. Return Policy Concern: Customers find the return policy to be unsatisfactory. These days, most customers expect a 30-day return policy.

7. Technical Issues on Website: Customers couldn’t complete the checkout due to technical issues on the website, and thus, left the card abandoned.

8. Lack of Clarity: Customers couldn’t calculate the total order cost.

9. Payment Option Issue: Customers didn’t find the required or enough payment options during checkout.

10. Credit Card Declined: Customers couldn’t complete the checkout as the credit card declined.

Keep in mind — some cart abandonment reasons are controllable while others are not. Focus on what’s within your control and work on those aspects. For example, if the customer’s credit card was declined, it’s not your fault, and there’s not much you could do about it.

That said, you can definitely set up a strategy to convert such website visitors later with email marketing, SMS promotions, or even AI-powered voice calls.

Pro tip: One reason that may not often come across in the statistics or reports is customers trying to get a discount offer. Some customers know the eCommerce brand strategies. They know that if they abandon the cart, they’ll likely receive an email or SMS with a discount offer. 

How to Use AI for Abandoned Carts Recovery

AI solutions have a crucial role in eCommerce to help enhance several areas, including abandoned cart recovery. We’ll go through various methods, strategies, and tools that can help you recover your lost revenue from abandoned carts.

(A) AI-Powered Preventive Measures to Reduce Cart Abandonments:

If your brand is facing the issue of high cart abandonments, and you’re focusing only on the recovery aspect, you’re making a mistake. Abandoned cart recovery is the secondary aspect, something you’d do after the damage is already done. But preventing those abandoned carts should be the primary focus. 

That’s why we’re going to help you with the steps that you should take to avoid cart abandonment in the first place.

1. Resolve All Concerns with Detailed Landing Pages

Many customers leave their carts simply because they’re hesitant to buy from you, especially when you’re a relatively new brand. They may not feel absolutely confident.

So, build landing pages that resolve all their queries, doubts, or concerns.

For example, if you identify that customers are abandoning their carts due to a lack of authenticity, address this issue on your landing page. Use trust badges, social proof, and UGC (User-generated content) to convey that your brand can be trusted.

GemPages Landing Page Builder can help you add all such elements and much more to your Shopify store and landing pages. With its visual drag-and-drop editor, you can easily customize and enhance your landing pages for better conversion.

Apart from professionally designed templates and elements, GemPages also offers the Image-to-Layout feature. Powered by GemAI, this feature lets you turn reference images or URLs into a customizable page layout in seconds. This will help you speed up the design process and keep up with the latest trends.

GemPages is one of the most popular landing page builder apps on the Shopify App Store. With a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars from over 2,600 reviews, GemPages is trusted by hundreds and thousands of merchants.

Pro tip: To avoid customers leaving your cart, create a sense of urgency using elements like a countdown timer, limited-time offer badge, stock counter, etc. Such elements create a sense of urgency or FOMO and encourage customers to complete the purchase. Again, GemPages can help you add these elements to your store and landing pages.

2. Create AI-Powered Hyper-Personalized Experience

We saw that most customers abandon carts when they find the cost is too high. But you must realize that customers are ready to pay higher prices when they can buy what they want. You have to offer them the best option.

This can be achieved through AI’s capabilities to learn customer behavior and offer personalized products. When customers find the product highly relevant to their needs and preferences, it increases the chances of conversion.

For example, Rebuy Personalization Engine is a Shopify app that can help you offer personalized product recommendations and search experience. The app has an excellent rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 700 reviews.

What’s even more amazing is that this app also offers other features that can enhance your cart flow and reduce cart abandonments. For example, the multi-tier progress bar adds an element of gamification and keeps the user engaged.

Also, it has more shopping cart features that can help you add star ratings, a phone number field, and a package protection offer to your cart page.

3. Use AI to Enhance the User Experience

Poor user experience could be one of the reasons your customers are abandoning the cart. We already saw the data on the reasons behind abandoned carts, and there were quite a few related to user experience:

• The site asking customers to create an account

• Lengthy and complicated checkout flow

• Not being able to see/calculate the total cost

• Technical errors on the website

As you can see, most reasons are related to the checkout process. Leverage AI to track and analyze the data — and identify if any such reasons are leading to cart abandonments on your store. 

4. Help Customers with AI-Powered Chatbots

Sometimes, customers leave the cart because they’re unable to resolve a query in their mind. Of course, the FAQs page could be helpful to resolve this issue to some extent.

But still, there could be scenarios where customers need further assistance before making the purchase. You can offer personalized query assistance through an AI-powered chatbot.

Here are some popular AI chatbot apps on the Shopify App Store:

• Chatty AI Chatbot & Live Chat
• Tidio ‑ Live Chat & AI Chatbot
• Willdesk: Live Chat & AI Chatbot

(B) AI-Powered Solutions for Abandoned Cart Recovery

We’ve gone through the strategies that could help you reduce the abandoned cart cases. However, no matter how much you try, there are going to be abandoned carts — and a lot of them.

So, now it’s time to prepare your brand with solutions and strategies that could help recover the sales and revenue from the carts that were abandoned.

5. Recover Abandoned Carts through AI-Powered Voice Calls

Once a customer has abandoned a cart and you have the customer’s phone number, you can reach out to the customer with an AI-powered voice call. The AI voice bot can interact with the user and lead the conversation to conversion.

6. Set Up an Email Campaign for Abandoned Cart Recovery

Email marketing has been an effective strategy for abandoned cart recovery for ages. Although it’s now considered a traditional strategy, it’s still one of the most lucrative strategies.

With an email marketing campaign for abandoned carts, you can remind customers about their cart and bring them back to your store to complete the purchase.

With AI, you can enhance your abandoned cart flow by using personalization and segmentation in your emails. Both of these strategies are quite useful to increase your conversion rate.

“Abandoned Cart Email Marketing” is a Shopify app that can help you create AI-powered emails

. The app has a great rating of 5.0 out of 5 stars from 100+ reviews.

7. Send AI-Powered Text/SMS for Abandoned Cart Recovery

Apart from email marketing, SMS marketing is a great strategy to remind your customers about the items they left in the cart. You can offer a discount to complete the purchase in X number of hours to create a sense of urgency.

The benefit of SMS is that customers are more likely to regularly check and open SMS on their phones compared to emails.

“TxtCart: SMS Marketing & AI” is a Shopify app that can help you with two-way SMS marketing campaigns.

TxtCart aims to create natural and personalized conversations based on the customer’s response. Also, each customers are given a unique discount code to ensure your strategy isn’t exploited.

Popular Shopify Apps for AI-Powered Email & SMS Marketing:

So, we’ve seen a couple of apps that can handle your email marketing and SMS marketing, respectively. However, you also have the option to go for an app that seamlessly handles both email and SMS marketing together.

Klaviyo is one such widely used app by Shopify merchants.

8. Run AI-Powered Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting is a marketing or ad strategy where you target specific users who have previously visited your website/app, browsed or interacted with your store/products but did not complete a purchase.

If you’re running paid ad campaigns, you can leverage AI for more effective retargeting ads.

Just like other business areas, AI can be utilized for multiple use cases in the retargeting strategy. Here are some key use cases of AI in retargeting campaigns:

• Segmentation: AI or ML (Machine Learning) technology can learn from user behavior, search intent, and browsing history to create better segmentation and deliver highly personalized ads.

• Scaling ads: When you’re scaling your spending on ads, you need a lot of ad creatives. You can use AI to design these ad creatives faster.

• Bidding optimization: AI can also be used to enhance the effectiveness of your bidding and ensure you’re maximizing your ROI on retargeting ads.

9. Build an AI-Powered Sales Funnel

Every website visitor landing on your website is either your existing or a potential customer. 

All potential customers (also known as “leads”) can be converted through a strategic sales funnel — even when they abandon the cart. If you have a robust sales funnel in place, your leads can be nurtured and converted through the funnel levels and stages.

As we’ve already seen, AI can be used to optimize various parts of your sales funnel, including the website and email marketing which are strong parts of your funnel.

Learn more: AI-Powered Website Optimization — Guide, Tools, and Tips

Final Thoughts on Using AI for Abandoned Carts

While abandoned carts are a tricky challenge, you can see it as an opportunity.

With the right strategy and proper implementation of AI tools, you can recover a significant amount of revenue from abandoned carts. However, you must test and measure the effectiveness of your experiments to keep improving the conversion rate.

To learn more about other eCommerce marketing strategies, trends, and best practices — check out more resources on the GemPages Blog. Also, join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.

FAQs About Abandoned Cart Recovery