"Should I replace Klaviyo with an SMS tool" is the wrong question, and it's the one most vendor pitches are built to answer anyway. The right question is narrower: what is Klaviyo actually built to do, and where does that stop being enough on its own.
Klaviyo runs flows, and flows are a genuinely good fit for a specific job: reaching a list at scale, on a predictable schedule, without needing a human to read anything back. Welcome series, post-purchase sequences, win-back campaigns, non-cart marketing, all of it plays to what a scheduled email sequence is built for. None of that needs to change.
Cart recovery is where the fit gets strained, not because Klaviyo's flow logic is weak, but because a scheduled sequence was never designed to hold a conversation. It sends message one, then message two on a timer, then a discount code, regardless of what the shopper does in between. That's fine for a shopper who just needed a reminder. It's not fine for a shopper who abandoned because of a real, answerable question.
Three things account for most cart abandonment: a surprise cost at checkout, shipping, tax, or fees pushing the total higher than expected; a shopper who wasn't ready to buy yet and drifted off mid-browse; or one unanswered question, sizing, fit, ingredients, whether it'll actually work for them. Email handles the middle case reasonably well, a reminder while intent is still warm. It handles the other two poorly, because neither a surprise cost nor an unanswered question gets resolved by a scheduled message that can't read a reply.
SMS opens at 90%+, against email's 20-30%. That gap gets quoted constantly and matters less than it sounds, because an open isn't a resolution. What actually predicts recovery is response rate, and a real two-way conversation gets a reply from 45-60% of shoppers it reaches, a number that doesn't exist for one-way channels regardless of format. A shopper who texts back "why is shipping $18" and gets a real answer behaves differently than one who gets a scheduled follow-up that ignores the question entirely.
CART picks up exactly the moment Klaviyo's flow architecture can't reach: the reply. When a shopper responds with an objection, a question, a reason she hesitated, CART answers it directly instead of moving to the next scripted step. No blast discount standing in for an answer nobody gave. The conversation ends when the actual objection gets resolved, not when the sequence runs out of steps.
This produces incremental recovery on top of whatever the existing flow already catches, not a replacement number. 10-15% more, on average, for stores running CART alongside their existing Klaviyo setup. That's the number worth anchoring on, incremental, not total, because CART was never meant to be graded against Klaviyo's job.
Ripping out Klaviyo to install an SMS tool solves a problem that doesn't exist. Email still reaches shoppers who never gave you a phone number. It still owns the welcome series and the non-cart campaigns that have nothing to do with checkout hesitation. None of that changes by adding a conversational layer underneath it.
What changes is the specific moment a shopper replies with something real. That moment either gets handled by a system built to read it, or it gets missed by one that isn't, and no amount of email flow optimization closes that gap, because the gap was never about email's quality. It was about what a scheduled sequence can structurally do.
Klaviyo ends where a shopper's reply needs an answer instead of the next step in a sequence. That's where CART begins, not as a replacement, but as the layer that catches what the flow was never built to catch.
Run your next 250 abandoned carts through CART, $0 charged, and see what it recovers before you commit to anything.
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