Abandoned cart email: the flow is free, the one before it is not

Every platform on this site can send an abandoned-cart email, including several free plans, so the tool is rarely the constraint. What separates them is the flow one step earlier — browse abandonment — and the plan tier that unlocks it.

This page sets out what each of the four store flows actually requires, which platforms publish the triggers for them, and what the cheapest way to run all four costs. It describes no recovery rates, because none were measured here and an invented one would read like a citation.

The four flows, in the order stores build them

• Abandoned cart. Someone added to the basket and left. Needs a cart-update event and a delay. Available on every platform here, including free plans.
• Browse abandonment. Someone viewed a product and left without adding anything. Needs on-site behaviour tracking. This is the one that forces an upgrade.
• Post-purchase. Follows the order confirmation: how to use it, when it ships, what goes with it. Needs an order event, which every platform has.
• Reorder or replenishment. Timed to roughly when the last order runs out. Needs purchase history and a long delay step, so it usually sits above the entry tier.

Those are four flows and four requirements. Two of them — cart and post-purchase — run anywhere. The other two are what the money is for.

Which platforms publish browse triggers

Moosend is the most explicit about it: its published feature table names a "when someone browses any page" trigger and a "when someone views any product" trigger. Omnisend and Klaviyo both build their ecommerce automation around the same class of on-site event, and Klaviyo's Marketing plan adds onsite personalisation on top.

Shopify's own email tool publishes ready-made automations for welcome, winback and upsell — all anchored on a customer or a purchase rather than on browsing. Sender publishes advanced ecommerce reports on its Standard plan. Where a platform does not publish a browse trigger by name, this page does not assert that it lacks one; it simply says the trigger is not published, which is the difference between reading a feature table and testing a product.

What running all four costs

The cheapest plan on each platform that can run the four flows, for a store with 5,000 contacts sending about 60,000 emails a month. Read at each vendor's own page on 24 September 2026, in US dollars.

Two genuinely free routes exist for the cart flow itself. Sender's free plan covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month with automation included, and any Shopify store gets 10,000 emails a month at no cost from Shopify's own tool. A store below those limits can run cart and post-purchase sequences without paying anybody.

Where the free route runs out

It runs out at browse abandonment, and it runs out at list size, in that order for most stores.

Sender's free tier holds until 2,500 subscribers or 15,000 emails a month, whichever arrives first. Fifteen thousand emails is a weekly campaign to about 3,400 people, or a smaller campaign plus a healthy volume of flow messages — so in practice the send allowance usually binds before the subscriber cap does for a store with active flows.

After that the step is to Sender Standard at $39 for 5,000 subscribers, or to Moosend at $38 on annual billing if the named browse triggers are what you are after. Neither is a large jump, which is part of why paying a three-figure monthly bill to run four standard flows is difficult to justify at this store size.

The meter decides what a longer sequence costs

One consequence of the three billing models is rarely spelled out and directly affects how you design these flows.

On a contact or profile meter — Omnisend, Sender, Moosend, Mailchimp, Klaviyo — adding a third cart reminder costs nothing at all until the send allowance binds. Omnisend Standard, Mailchimp Standard and Sender Standard all allow twelve emails per contact per month, which is a generous ceiling for a store running four flows plus a weekly campaign.

On an emails-sent meter, every message in the sequence has a price you can point at. On Shopify Email, past the free 10,000, a reminder to 5,000 people costs five dollars. That is small, but it is visible in a way the contact-metered version is not, and it makes the trade-off between a longer sequence and a shorter one an explicit decision rather than an invisible one.

The timing question, answered honestly

How long to wait before the first reminder, and how many to send, is the question every guide on this subject answers with a number. This one will not, because the honest answer is that Reorderly has not run these sequences on a live store and has sourced no study it is willing to cite as evidence.

What can be said usefully is structural. Each additional reminder costs sending on every platform here, and on an emails-sent meter that cost is directly visible — a third reminder to a 5,000-person list is 5,000 more emails, which on Shopify Email is five dollars. On a contact meter it is free until the allowance binds. So the platforms disagree about whether adding a message to the sequence costs anything, and that is worth knowing before designing it.

Test intervals against your own orders. A store selling something people buy on impulse and a store selling something people research for a fortnight do not share an answer, and no published figure is going to change that.

All seven platforms priced at two store sizes are in the main comparison, and what SMS adds to any of these flows is costed separately.