Why your abandoned cart emails aren't sending (Tiendanube and Shopify)

The problem isn't your flow

The first thing almost everyone does when abandoned cart "underperforms" is tweak the email: change the subject line, add a coupon, adjust the wait time. It can help a little, but it doesn't touch the root problem.

An abandoned cart flow has a condition nobody mentions in the tutorial: it only fires if your email platform knows who the visitor is. If it doesn't have their email tied to that visit, there's no one to write to. The cart exists, the abandonment exists, but to your email tool it's an anonymous visitor.

That's why the problem is almost never the email: it's the data. Fix that and your email revenue can double.

What each platform requires to send the email

Tiendanube's native email

According to Tiendanube's help center, a cart counts as abandoned when the customer reaches the payment step and clicks "Continue to payment", and they must have filled in the email field at checkout. In automatic mode, the email goes out 6 hours after the cart is created. Everyone who left before that step —which is most of the people who abandon— is left out.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo's onsite tracking guide says it plainly: its tracking only records activity from "known browsers", browsers that have already been identified. That happens when the person clicked one of your emails or SMS, subscribed through a Klaviyo form or logged in to your store (with logged-in user tracking set up). And the event most used for the flow, Started Checkout, only fires once the customer has entered their contact details and moved on to the shipping step.

Perfit

Perfit's help center (now Marketing Nube on Tiendanube) makes clear that its abandoned cart and browse automations only send if the contact is identified: they have an active session, they've logged in before on that same browser, they filled in their details on the first checkout step or they reached the store by clicking a Perfit email.

Three different platforms, same rule: no identification, no email.

Why your store "forgets" people it already knows

The frustrating part is that many of those anonymous visitors aren't strangers. They've bought from you before, they're on your list, they've opened your emails. But identification lives in a browser cookie, and that cookie gets lost all the time:

• Instagram's browser. When someone taps your ad or the link in your bio, the store opens inside Instagram, with its own cookies. Even if that person bought from you on Chrome last week, in there they show up as a stranger.
• Safari and its 7-day limit. Since 2019, with Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1, WebKit (Safari's engine) caps cookies created from JavaScript at seven days, which is how email platforms' tracking scripts create them. If your customer comes back in the second week, your store no longer knows who they are.
• Blockers. Your email platform's tracking runs as a script in the browser. If a blocker shuts it off, that visit doesn't exist for your tool.
• Another device. They subscribed from their laptop and today they're browsing on their phone. To your email platform, that's a different person.

What you can do today, without spending anything

• Measure the gap. Pick one week. Count the abandoned carts or checkouts your store shows and compare them with the number of people who entered your flow that same week. That difference is your identification problem, in your own numbers.
• Don't send two emails for the same cart. If you use Klaviyo or Perfit, turn off Tiendanube's native abandoned cart notification (Tiendanube explains how in its help center). Otherwise, the few identified people get two emails and everyone else gets none.
• Ask for the email earlier. A pop-up with a real reason to leave an email (shipping, installments, early access) identifies people before they reach checkout. The earlier you identify them, the more flows they can receive.
• Use every available trigger. If your integration records "Added to Cart", build a flow on that event in addition to the started checkout one. And add a browse abandonment flow for people who looked at a product and left.
• Review your flow filters. Conditions like "hasn't been in this flow in the last X days" or smart sending leave people out on purpose. It's fine that they exist, but you need to know how much they cut.
• Put links in all your emails. In Klaviyo and Perfit, a click in an email identifies the person on that browser. Every campaign with good links is a round of identification.

All of this helps. But none of these tactics fixes the root issue: identification still depends on a browser cookie that Instagram doesn't share, that Safari deletes and that a blocker shuts off.

How Escalafy's Email Pixel solves it

The Escalafy pixel is first-party and processes every event server-side. It doesn't depend on a script a blocker can shut off or on a cookie Safari deletes after 7 days. When someone has already given you their email —in a purchase, at checkout or in a pop-up— we recognize them for much longer and across many more visits.

Then we send every complete event to Klaviyo or Perfit through the official integration: product viewed, cart, checkout started and purchase, with the identified profile and the product data. Your browse, cart and abandoned checkout flows start going out to many more people. Your copy, your discounts and your timing stay the same. On average, that's double the email revenue.

Escalafy doesn't send emails or add contacts on its own: it only identifies people who already gave you their email. Your platform keeps applying its consent and frequency rules. It's live in about five minutes, without touching your theme.