The Checkout Abandonment Flow: Turn Off Shopify's First

The checkout abandonment flow fires when someone enters their email at checkout and leaves without ordering. It is the highest-intent flow you can build. Before you turn it on, turn off the one Shopify is already sending, or your customers get both.

This is not your abandoned cart flow

Two different Klaviyo metrics, two different people.

Added to Cart means someone put a product in the basket and wandered off. Checkout Started means they typed their email address and stopped. The second person is much closer to buying, so the flow is faster and the emails are shorter.

Everything below is the Checkout Started flow. The other one has its own article.

Turn off Shopify's email first

This is the step people skip, and it is the reason some brands send every checkout abandoner two sets of emails from two systems.

Shopify has a native abandoned checkout email that sends on its own. If you switch on a Klaviyo flow without disabling it, both fire. Klaviyo's own help documentation says to disable the Shopify version, and to do it right before you enable the Klaviyo flow so there is no gap where nobody gets anything.

Two places to check, because Shopify has moved this setting:

Settings > Checkout > Abandoned checkouts
  Set the frequency to Never

Marketing > Automations
  Find the abandoned checkout email, click the three dots, Turn off

Check both. Then send yourself a test order and abandon it.

Klaviyo's default is one email

The flow Klaviyo creates for you out of the box contains a single message.

One email is not a sequence. It catches the people who were going to come back anyway and misses everyone who needed a second reason. Three is the working minimum.

The default timing is also not what you want, which brings up the one thing the guidance disagrees about.

The timing argument

Most agencies tell you to send the first checkout abandonment email at 30 minutes. The logic is sound. Intent decays fast, and someone who got as far as the payment step is still nearby.

Klaviyo's own documentation says something different. If your store runs on an integration other than Shopify or BigCommerce, Started Checkout data may not sync immediately, and some integrations sync only once an hour. Klaviyo recommends a delay of at least 1 hour and 15 minutes so the email does not fire before the data arrives.

So the answer depends on your stack:

• Shopify or BigCommerce: 30 to 60 minutes is fine. The data is there.
• Anything else: start at 1 hour 15 minutes or later, or your first email goes out with the cart contents missing.

If you are not sure how often your integration syncs, use the longer delay. An email that arrives 45 minutes later still works. An email that arrives on time with an empty product block does not.

The spec

Field Value Trigger Checkout Started Filters Placed Order zero times since starting this flow Emails 3 Timing 1 hour, 24 hours, 48 hours Exit condition Placed order One job Recover the order

Email 1, at 1 hour. Short. Show what they were buying and one button back to the checkout. Do not explain your brand. They were 30 seconds from ordering and something interrupted them, and often the interruption was a phone call rather than a doubt.

Email 2, at 24 hours. Now assume a real objection, and pick the most likely one. Baymard ranks the fixable reasons people abandon like this:

Reason Share Extra costs: shipping, tax, fees 48% Had to create an account 26% Checkout too long 22% Did not trust the site with card details 19%

Read that list again and notice it maps directly onto email 2. If your shipping threshold is the problem, state it plainly. If it is trust, put the guarantee and the returns policy in front of them. If it is the form, say that guest checkout exists.

Email 3, at 48 hours. Last one. This is where an incentive goes if you use one. Not before.

Why your two dashboards disagree

At some point you will compare Klaviyo's checkout started count against Shopify's abandoned checkout count and find they do not match. This is normal and it wastes a lot of people's afternoons.

Klaviyo logs Checkout Started the moment someone enters an email and moves forward. Shopify only records an abandoned checkout once the shopper gets further along, and it will not record one at all if the person later completes the order. The two systems are counting different events with similar names.

One more wrinkle. If the same person starts checkout on their phone and then again on a laptop, Shopify creates two abandoned checkout records. Klaviyo usually sends one email, because Smart Sending suppresses the second. That is the correct outcome. Nobody wants the same reminder twice in an hour.

Pick one system as the number you report on. Klaviyo is the better choice, because it is the one deciding who gets an email.

Where this sits in the system

Checkout abandonment is 3 of 12, and along with the cart flow it is one of the two that catch money already in motion. Build both before anything else.

What it cannot do is make anyone buy twice. A recovered checkout is still one order from one customer. The flow that works on the second order is post-purchase, and it fires the moment this one succeeds.

Get the whole system

This is 1 flow of 12.

12 flows, 37 emails, one job: repeat purchases. Every trigger, every send delay, every exit condition, written out so you can build them this month.