Cart recovery: 'your basket is waiting' has to open the basket

Someone adds three things to a basket and leaves. Six hours later you send the reminder. They tap it, and land on the home tab. The basket is still there — three taps away — but you have just asked someone who was already drifting to go find it. Most don't.

What problem does this solve?

The reminder has to reopen the app on the basket, or on the single item if it was a single item, with any incentive already applied. And you need to know whether the reminder produced the order, or whether they would have come back anyway.

How do you set the links up?

The re-engagement link carries the cart identifier and the incentive, if there is one. Because this user already has the app, the link opens it directly; if they've since uninstalled, the same link survives the reinstall and lands on the basket after.

{
  "deepLinkPath": "/cart/c_88213",
  "customData": {"cmp": "abandon-6h", "incentive": "free-ship", "expires": "24h"}
}

When should it send, and through what?

The same link works in push and email. Push opens the app directly; email goes through smart routing. Either way the destination is the basket.

How do you know the message did it?

Send the purchase as a post-install event and let it attribute to the re-engagement campaign. Then compare recovery rate against a holdout that got no message — a slice of abandoned carts you deliberately leave alone. The uplift over the holdout is what the message is worth; the raw recovery rate includes everyone who was coming back anyway.

What should the basket screen show when they come back?

Exactly what they left, with the incentive already applied and nothing to redo. The items should still be there — if one has gone out of stock, say so on that line rather than silently dropping it, because a basket that quietly shrank reads as a bug. The discount from the message should be visible on the total before they touch anything, not waiting behind a code field. And the path from this screen to a completed order should be as short as the app allows: a returning abandoner has already decided once and changed their mind; the second decision needs to be easier than the first.

Which metric should you watch?

Recovered revenue per message sent, against the holdout. If the incentive is doing the work rather than the reminder, that number tells you, and it may mean the reminder alone is enough.