How an abandoned cart flow works
The trigger is an add-to-cart event followed by silence. If the shop records that somebody put an item in the basket and does not record an order from that person inside a set window, the flow starts. A short sequence follows: a reminder that the basket is still there, then a nudge, and sometimes an incentive at the end.
One condition has to be met before any of that can happen — the shop must know who the shopper is. That means a logged-in customer, somebody who arrived from an email link, or a visitor who typed an address into the checkout before leaving. Anonymous browsers cannot be emailed, which is why the flow always reaches fewer people than the cart abandonment rate in your analytics implies.
An exit condition on the order event pulls the shopper out the moment they pay, so nobody is chased for something they have already bought.
Why it matters
These are the warmest contacts a shop has. They chose the product, read the price and went as far as the basket, so the sequence is not persuading a stranger — it is removing whatever stopped a decision that was nearly made. That is why it usually earns more per message than any other automated sequence in an online shop.
It is also diagnostic. Replies to cart emails tell you plainly what went wrong: the delivery charge appeared late, the payment option they wanted was missing, the size guide was unclear. Those answers are worth as much as the recovered orders.
Where it goes wrong
Leading with a discount is the classic mistake. Regular shoppers learn quickly that abandoning the basket produces a code, and the flow starts paying people to do something they were going to do anyway.
The deeper error is using email to paper over a broken checkout. If shoppers leave because postage is only revealed on the final screen, because the card form rejects local cards, or because the only payment methods on offer are ones they do not hold, no reminder will fix it. In Nepal in particular, a shop that cannot offer the payment methods its customers actually use, cash on delivery included, will see carts stall at the same step no matter how well the emails are written.
What to do about it
Check the checkout first. Walk through a purchase on a phone, on mobile data, with every payment method you accept, and note where the friction sits — that is conversion work, not email work, and it lifts every visitor rather than the identified few.
Then keep the sequence short and helpful. Send the first message while the decision is still fresh, show the items and their images so there is nothing to remember, and answer the obvious objections — delivery cost, returns, how to pay. Hold any discount back to the final message, use it sparingly, and give it an expiry so it does not become the standing price.