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Recover abandoned carts

Learn how to recover abandoned Checkout pages and boost revenue.

In e-commerce, cart abandonment is when customers leave the checkout flow before completing their purchase. To help bring customers back to Checkout, create a recovery flow where you follow up with customers over email to complete their purchases.

Cart abandonment emails fall into the broader category of promotional emails, which includes emails that inform customers of new products and that share coupons and discounts. Customers must agree to receive promotional emails before you can contact them. Checkout helps you:

  1. Collect consent from customers to send them promotional emails.
  2. Get notified when customers abandon Checkout so you can send cart abandonment emails.

Collect promotional consent

Configure Checkout to collect consent for promotional content. If you collect the customer’s email address and request consent for promotional content before redirecting to Checkout, you can skip using consent_collection[promotions].

Command Line
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}}
 \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d customer=
{{CUSTOMER_ID}}
 \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  -d "consent_collection[promotions]"=auto

Configure recovery

A Checkout Session becomes abandoned when it reaches its expires_at timestamp and the customer hasn’t completed checking out. When this occurs, the session is no longer accessible and Stripe fires the checkout.session.expired webhook, which you can listen to and try to bring the customer back to a new Checkout Session to complete their purchase. To use this feature, enable after_expiration.recovery when you create the session.

Command Line
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}}
 \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  -d customer=
{{CUSTOMER_ID}}
 \
  -d "consent_collection[promotions]"=auto \
  -d "after_expiration[recovery][enabled]"=true \
  -d "after_expiration[recovery][allow_promotion_codes]"=true

Get notified of abandonment

Listen to the checkout.session.expired webhook to be notified when customers abandon Checkout and sessions expire. When the session expires with recovery enabled, the webhook payload contains after_expiration, which includes a URL denoted by after_expiration.recovery.url that you can embed in cart abandonment emails. When the customer opens this URL, it creates a new Checkout Session that’s a copy of the original expired session. The customer uses this copied session to complete the purchase.

Note

For security purposes, the recovery URL for a session is usable for 30 days, denoted by the after_expiration.recovery.expires_at timestamp.

{
  "id": "evt_123456789",
  "object": "event",
  "type": "checkout.session.expired",
  // ...other webhook attributes
  "data": {
    "object": {
      "id": "cs_12356789",
      "object": "checkout.session",
      // ...other Checkout Session attributes
      "consent_collection": {
        "promotions": "auto",
      },
      "consent": {
        "promotions": "opt_in"
      },
      "after_expiration": {
        "recovery": {
          "enabled": true,
          "url": "https://buy.stripe.com/r/live_asAb1724",
          "allow_promotion_code": true,
          "expires_at": 1622908282,
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Send recovery emails

To send recovery emails, create a webhook handler for expired sessions and send an email that embeds the session’s recovery URL. A customer might abandon multiple Checkout Sessions, each triggering its own checkout.session.expired event so make sure to record when you send recovery emails to customers and avoid spamming them.

// Find your endpoint's secret in your Dashboard's webhook settings
const endpointSecret = 'whsec_...';

// Using Express
const app = require('express')();

// Use body-parser to retrieve the raw body as a buffer
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

const sendRecoveryEmail = (email, recoveryUrl) => {
  // TODO: fill me in
  console.log("Sending recovery email", email, recoveryUrl);
}

app.post('/webhook', bodyParser.raw({type: 'application/json'}), (request, response) => {
  const payload = request.body;
  const sig = request.headers['stripe-signature'];

  let event;

  try {
    event = stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(payload, sig, endpointSecret);
  } catch (err) {
    return response.status(400).send(`Webhook Error: ${err.message}`);
  }

  // Handle the checkout.session.expired event
  if (event.type === 'checkout.session.expired') {
    const session = event.data.object;

    // When a Checkout Session expires, the customer's email isn't returned in
    // the webhook payload unless they give consent for promotional content
    const email = session.customer_details?.email
    const recoveryUrl = session.after_expiration?.recovery?.url

    // Do nothing if the Checkout Session has no email or recovery URL
    if (!email || !recoveryUrl) {
      return response.status(200).end();
    }

    // Check if the customer has consented to promotional emails and
    // avoid spamming people who abandon Checkout multiple times
    if (
      session.consent?.promotions === 'opt_in'
      && !hasSentRecoveryEmailToCustomer(email)
    ) {
      sendRecoveryEmail(email, recoveryUrl)
    }
  }
  response.status(200).end();
});
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On this page
Collect promotional consent
Configure recovery
Get notified of abandonment
Send recovery emails
Products Used
Checkout