@steam365 Hey, this is a great question! You’re correct that the typical “Cart Abandonment” Flow in Klaviyo on most platforms, is actually being triggered on a “Checkout Started.” This means that the Flow doesn’t actually start unless the user advances to the checkout page. In other words, a better name for this should have been “Checkout Abandonment” Flow. :)
Luckily, Klaviyo has a robust API where you can pass the “Added to Cart” event (or any events!) as your own custom metric. Once you create your own “Added to Cart” metric, you can then use that as a Trigger for your own custom flow.
If you’re on Shopify, Klaviyo has some documentation to help you get started on this. Take a look at this article Create a Custom “Added to Cart” Event for Shopify
Just note a couple of caveats:
- The Added to Cart event only happens when the user has been previously identified on that particular device/browser. A user is identified whenever users have subscribed via a Klaviyo Form, or clicked through from a Klaviyo email in the past. Obviously, an unidentified user means Klaviyo doesn’t know who to send that email to!
- Make sure you also have “Viewed Product” also installed so that the product detail is also available to be used dynamically in your template. For example, if you want to show the items image, price, link to the product, etc.
- You want to make sure your Flow has some Filters to prevent someone getting multiple Cart Abandonment emails in a single session. As each time someone “Adds to Cart” it will Trigger your Flow.
- The example in Klaviyo passes the current item that was “Added to Cart” and doesn’t log all the items that may have been previously added. To do that, would require additional coding in your Theme that is outside the scope of that documentation. For most merchants, this isn’t a big deal, but if your customers typically add more than one item on checkout, you may want to work with a developer to build a more robust “Added to Cart” event that also passes in the content of their entire Cart. If that important to your particular needs, you can show all the items in the current Cart.
Hope this helps!
