Case Study
Recovering $48K in abandoned carts in 30 days: a Shopify success story
For most Shopify stores, cart recovery means email. You buy an app, it sends three reminders over five days, and a small percentage of customers come back. The rest you write off — they didn't open the emails.
This skincare brand had been running that exact playbook for two years. About 67% of carts above $50 ended up abandoned, of which their email tool was recovering 8%. Everything else evaporated.
The setup
They connected their Shopify store to Voxys Connect — a one-click integration — and built a single WhatsApp cart-recovery bot flow:
1. 2 hours after abandonment: friendly message with a photo of the cart contents and a "complete checkout" link 2. 24 hours later (if no purchase): a 10% off code with the same checkout link 3. 72 hours later (if still no purchase): a sizing-question flow ("any questions before you check out?") that handed off to a human if the customer engaged
Captain AI handled the third step's open-ended responses. If a customer asked about ingredients or shipping, the AI answered from the product catalog directly.
The numbers
After 30 days running both email and WhatsApp recovery in parallel:
- Carts recovered by email: 8% (their baseline)
- Carts recovered by WhatsApp: 31% — almost 4x the email recovery rate
- Total additional revenue: $48,200
- Spend: ~$340 in WhatsApp utility messages + Voxys Business subscription
Why WhatsApp out-performs email here
Three reasons the team identified:
Read rate. WhatsApp messages get read within minutes. Promotional emails get filtered, archived, or never opened.
Photo of the actual cart. Showing the items the customer was about to buy reminded them what they were missing. The email version had to compete with twenty other "you left something behind" templates.
Conversational fallback. The third reminder triggered real conversations. Customers asked questions, the AI answered, and a meaningful percentage closed because their hesitation got addressed.
What's next
The brand is rolling out post-purchase upsell flows — recommending complementary products 14 days after a customer's first order. Early signal looks similar: WhatsApp open rates are 6x their email open rates.