Turning cart abandonment into a decisioning journey — not just another reminder sequence
I’m sharing one of the lifecycle journeys we run at Ornikar to recover driving-course prospects who viewed their cart but did not complete their purchase.
Goal
The objective was not simply to send a series of cart reminders.
We wanted to address three different barriers to conversion over time:
- Forgetfulness or distraction: remind users what they left behind.
- Inertia: make it easy to return and complete the purchase.
- Remaining doubts: offer human assistance when another product reminder is unlikely to help.
At the same time, we wanted to avoid messaging users who had already converted and maintain a permanent control group to measure true incremental impact.
Architecture
The Canvas is triggered by a cart_viewed event, with users eligible to re-enter after 10 days.
10% of users enter a control group and receive no messages.
The remaining 90% enter the active journey.
Touch 1 — Product reminder after 30 minutes
An Action Path monitors whether the user completes a purchase during the first 30 minutes.
- Purchasers exit immediately.
- Everyone else continues to a Context Step.
- The Context Step prepares the product information and the correct desktop and app destinations.
- The user then receives an email and push reminder featuring the product previously viewed.
This initial delay intentionally leaves room for natural conversion before CRM intervenes.
Touch 2 — Channel selection after one day
The Canvas waits another day and checks for a purchase again.
Users who have converted exit the journey. For the remaining users, the product context is refreshed before an Intelligent Channel split:
- Push is used when it is the most relevant eligible channel.
- Email acts as the alternative path.
The message also uses Liquid and our Braze product catalog to retrieve the appropriate price based on the product and the user’s pricing zone. If no valid catalog match exists, the message gracefully falls back to copy without a price.
Touch 3 — Moving from persuasion to assistance
After one more day, the Canvas performs a final purchase check and applies an additional eligibility filter.
Instead of repeating the same commercial message, the last touch changes the angle entirely: users with limited purchase history are invited to contact an Ornikar advisor who can answer their questions and help them complete their registration.
Quiet Hours are enabled throughout the journey to keep the communication pressure appropriate.
Why we designed it this way
The key principle is simple: every delay is also a new decision point.
The journey does not assume that someone who abandoned their cart two days ago is still in the same situation today. Purchase checks continuously remove converters, Context Steps preserve the relevant product and destination data, and channel routing prevents us from blindly sending the same combination of messages to everyone.
It also lets the messaging evolve with the likely barrier:
reminder → convenience → reassurance
Impact
We kept the 10% control group active to measure incrementality rather than relying only on attributed conversions.
Across the January–April 2026 cohorts:
- Treatment conversion rate: 6.98%
- Control conversion rate: 4.48%
- Weighted relative lift: +55.8%
- Absolute uplift: +2.5 percentage points
The measurement uses a 10-day post-exposure conversion window and excludes purchases occurring during the first 30 minutes, helping us separate the Canvas impact from users who were already likely to complete their purchase organically.
Beyond the conversion lift, one of our most valuable learnings was that an effective abandonment journey should not repeat the same argument three times. As time passes, the user’s likely barrier changes.
