Blog · Practical guide

How to recover abandoned carts on WhatsApp with Shopify or WooCommerce

By the Super Agent team · October 20, 2026

Why WhatsApp works for abandoned carts

An abandoned-cart email competes with dozens of promotions. A WhatsApp message lands where your customer already chats, and it invites what email rarely gets: a reply. Plenty of checkouts stall on a question (shipping, payment, the product itself), and a message someone can answer turns that question into a conversation.

The trade-off is the rules. Once 24 hours have passed since the customer’s last message, you can only write to them with a Meta-approved template, and a cart reminder is a marketing template. Meta bills those messages to the business’s own WhatsApp Business account, so send few and send them well.

What you need first

• A number on the WhatsApp Business API (Meta’s Cloud API). The WhatsApp Business app on your phone cannot send templates automatically.
• The shopper’s phone number, collected at checkout.
• A recovery link for each cart. Shopify keeps every abandoned checkout with its own link. WooCommerce has no abandoned-cart object, but an order left pending, failed or as a draft carries a payment link that drops the shopper straight back at the pay step.

Step 1. Ask for the phone number at checkout

No phone number, no WhatsApp. In Shopify, check your checkout settings so the phone number is collected and, if your business allows it, required. In WooCommerce, make sure the billing phone field is shown and required. A cart without a number is simply skipped.

Step 2. Write two templates that carry the cart link

This is the pair Super Agent submits to Meta for review on your behalf when your console is in English, word for word:

Four choices sit behind that copy:

1. {{1}} is the first name, and it always has a fallback. Many checkouts are guests with no name, and an empty variable stops the send. “there” reads naturally in both messages.
2. {{2}} is that shopper’s own cart link, not your home page. That is what makes the message useful.
3. No discount in the first message. A coupon in the first reminder teaches customers to abandon to get one, and written into the body it is frozen once Meta approves the template.
4. No invented urgency. “Only a few left” is a promise about your stock. The second message swaps pressure for a question: what stopped you?

One detail that causes rejections: Meta rejects templates whose body ends on a variable, which is why both messages close with a sentence after the link. Before you submit yours, run them through the WhatsApp template checker.

Step 3. Get the timing right

Send the first message about 30 minutes after the cart is abandoned. Earlier, many shoppers are still comparing; much later, the impulse has gone. In Super Agent the minimum is 15 minutes, because carts sync from your store every 15 minutes.

Send the second 25 hours after the first. The number is deliberate: Super Agent sends no more than one marketing message from a flow to the same person in 24 hours, and 25 hours clears that limit every time. Waiting three days does not help either, because by then the cart is usually gone.

Two messages are enough: a third spends more patience than it recovers.

Step 4. Stop when they buy, and honour opt-outs

The worst thing a reminder can do is ask someone to finish an order they already placed. Before every message, and again after the wait, check whether that person has bought since abandoning, or whether the cart was recovered or expired: if so, the sequence ends.

And always leave a way out. Super Agent recognises the common opt-out replies, such as “stop” or “unsubscribe”, and stops sending marketing templates to that number.

Step 5. Answer when they reply

The second message asks for a reply, so somebody has to be there, at 11pm too. In Super Agent that reply lands in a conversation your agent handles. It knows your shipping, your payment options and your catalogue, checks live prices and stock, and can create a checkout link for what the shopper wants without sending them back through the store. When the conversation needs a person, the agent pauses itself and alerts you.

Step 6. Measure recovered orders, not messages sent

Counting everyone who got the message and later bought includes the people who were going to buy anyway. In Super Agent every link a flow sends is tagged (utm_source=whatsapp, utm_medium=wf, the flow’s campaign and a reference to the send), and the Workflows page shows each flow’s sales counting only orders that arrive with that reference. The figure is conservative on purpose: a shopper who reads the message and buys without tapping the link is not counted.

Setting it up in Super Agent

1. Connect your WhatsApp number and your Shopify or WooCommerce store from the Get started page.
2. Super Agent then submits the two templates above, cart_reminder and cart_last_call, to Meta for review in your console’s language. There is no form to fill in.
3. Once Meta approves them, a card appears to switch on your first abandoned-cart flow. One press creates it and turns it on: 30 minutes, first message, a 25-hour wait, second message.
4. It is an ordinary flow: change the copy or the timing, or switch it off, from Workflows.

If you already have any flow, Super Agent submits nothing on its own: you build it from the abandoned-cart recipe in Workflows.

How much could you recover?

It depends on how many checkouts you lose and what an average cart is worth. Estimate it from your own numbers with the abandoned cart calculator, check whether the messages pay for themselves with the WhatsApp campaign ROAS calculator and, before reaching for a discount, run the discount break-even calculator.