Most stores can quote their conversion rate without blinking. Ask the same store what unrecovered cart revenue costs them over a year, and the answer is usually a shrug, or a vague sense that "some money" is walking out the door. Nobody runs the actual math, because nobody's ever handed them the inputs to run it with.
Here's the math, using a real Shopify profile and the same assumptions behind our own recovery calculator, so you can plug in your own numbers afterward and see where you land.
Take a store doing 2,500 completed orders a month at a $120 average order value, a common profile for a mid-volume Shopify brand. Industry research puts cart abandonment near 70%, and roughly 80% of a store's completed order volume shows up as a reasonable proxy for its recoverable abandoned-checkout pool. For this store, that's 2,000 recoverable checkouts a month.
At $120 AOV, that's $240,000 in checkout revenue walking away every month, before a single recovery attempt. Annualized, that's $2.88 million sitting in abandoned checkouts over a year, revenue the store already earned the traffic and the intent for, and never converted.
Most of that $2.88 million was never recoverable in the first place, plenty of abandoned carts belong to shoppers who were never going to buy that day regardless of what anyone did. The question isn't whether all of it is recoverable. It's how much of it is, and what leaving that percentage on the table costs across a year.
Using a conservative 6-12% recovery range, the range our own calculator uses as its floor and ceiling, and holding the default 10% expected case in the middle:
| Scenario | Recovery Rate | Recovered Revenue / Year |
|---|---|---|
| Conservative floor | 6% | $172,800 |
| Expected case | 10% | $288,000 |
| Upside | 12% | $345,600 |
Even at the conservative floor, a store this size is leaving roughly $173,000 a year on the table by doing nothing beyond whatever flow is already running. That's not a hypothetical number pulled from an industry report. It's what 6% of this specific store's own recoverable checkout pool is worth, using its own order volume and AOV.
The other side of this math matters just as much: what does capturing that revenue actually cost. At roughly $1 average cost per engaged cart, a widely used benchmark for managed conversational SMS, engaging 2,000 recoverable checkouts a month runs about $2,000 a month, or $24,000 a year.
Set against $172,800 recovered at the conservative floor, that's better than 7x return before accounting for anything beyond the recovery rate itself. At the 10% expected case, it's 12x. The gap between "doing nothing" and "running a conservative recovery program" isn't a marginal efficiency play. It's the difference between capturing seven figures of checkout revenue a store already earned the traffic for, and letting it walk.
Everything above holds AOV flat, recovered orders at the same $120 average, no lift. That's the conservative read, and it's worth running the numbers that way first. But a real conversation doesn't just resolve the objection that stopped a shopper, it's also a natural moment to surface a complementary item, the kind of modest upsell a scheduled discount code can't offer because it isn't having a conversation at all.
How much that moves AOV varies by category and catalog, which is exactly why we didn't bake a specific lift percentage into the numbers above. Our calculator has a toggle for this, recovery-only versus recovery-plus-AOV-lift, so you can see both numbers side by side for your own store rather than trusting an industry-wide estimate that may not fit your catalog.
The math above uses one store's profile. Yours has a different AOV, different order volume, a different recoverable pool. The calculator on our homepage runs the same methodology, 80% recoverable-checkout estimate, 6-12% recovery range, ~$1 average cost per engaged cart, against your actual inputs, and shows you the conservative floor, expected case, and upside for your store specifically, plus what turning on AOV lift does to the picture.
The exercise takes about ten seconds. What it usually reveals is a number a lot bigger than "some money," and specific enough to actually act on.
Run your next 250 abandoned carts through CART, $0 charged, and see what it recovers before you commit to anything.
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