Job · Cart recovery
Bring back the carts that are worth a message.
A cart goes quiet. The rules decide whether it earns a message, one marketing template reopens the thread, and the campaign stops the moment the order lands. In Egypt that template costs about eighteen times a utility one, which is why the rules matter more than the wording.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
What it looks like
A cart detected, the rules checked, one template sent.
The interesting part is everything that happens before the send — and the stop condition afterwards.
The cart is detected and parked
A cart event arrives from your store or a webhook you send. Nothing goes out yet; the wait time is yours to set.
The rules run
Opted in, not messaged in the last seven days, cart above your threshold, no order placed since. Every rule is visible and editable, and a failed rule is recorded as a skip.
The window and category are checked
The last customer message was days ago, so the 24-hour window is closed and a template is required. The category is marketing, and the cost per send is shown before anything leaves.
One template goes out
Not a sequence of five. The template's only job is to reopen the thread, because everything after the reply is a conversation that costs nothing per message.
The order lands and the campaign stops
A purchase, an unsubscribe or a complaint ends the sequence for that customer immediately.
The problem
Cart recovery is the one job where sending more makes it worse.
Every other job on this site gets cheaper with volume. This one gets more expensive, because the message category is the expensive one.
- Abandoned carts are not equal
- Messaging every abandoned cart turns a recovery programme into a cost centre. The cheapest campaign is the one that skips the carts that were never going to convert.
- Marketing is the expensive category
- In Egypt a marketing template costs $0.0644 against $0.0036 for utility. Same characters, eighteen times the bill. The rate card and its source are below.
- Consent is not optional
- Marketing templates require opt-in. Sending without it risks the phone number itself, which is a far worse outcome than a lost cart.
- Nobody tells you the real per-message cost
- Merchants discover the marketing rate on the invoice. A page like this one is cheaper than the churn it prevents.
Public review of a different WhatsApp app on the Shopify App Store, Egypt, 22 October 2026, written after about sixteen hours of use.
“Incorrect Marketing Message Pricing: The app advertises the cost of marketing messages as 0.01, but the actual cost is significantly higher, at approximately 0.07. This discrepancy is misleading.”
Public review of a different WhatsApp app on the Shopify App Store, Egypt, 22 October 2026, written after about sixteen hours of use.
Not a BlendDesk customer. We publish it because the figure that surprised this merchant — roughly $0.07 — is simply Meta's published Egypt marketing rate, and a page like this one would have prevented the surprise.
How it works
The mechanism, step by step.
Rules you can read, a cost you can see, and a stop condition that fires on the first signal.
- Detection
- Cart events arrive from your store integration or from a webhook you send. BlendDesk does not need a plugin in order to be told that a cart exists.
- Eligibility rules
- Opt-in status, frequency cap, cart value, customer history, time since last contact. Nothing is hidden inside a scoring model you cannot inspect.
- Window and category
- If the 24-hour window is open, the follow-up is a service message. If it is closed, the send is a marketing template, and that is stated before you launch rather than after.
- One message, then a conversation
- The template reopens the thread; Scout handles the questions that follow — stock, sizing, delivery, payment — inside the window, at no per-message cost beyond the service allowance.
- Stop conditions
- Ordered, unsubscribed, complained, already messaged this week. Any one of them ends the sequence for that customer.
- Measurement
- Sends, replies, orders and cost per send, from your own campaigns. We publish no recovery-rate benchmark, because we have no honest one to publish.
What it costs to send
This one is marketing, and marketing is about 18× utility.
An abandoned cart is not a transaction the customer completed, so a reminder is a marketing template. That is Meta's rule, not ours, and it is the single number to run before you build a campaign.
- Cart recovery template (Egypt)
- $0.0644
- Marketing category. Required whenever the 24-hour window is closed — which, for an abandoned cart, it usually is.
- Utility template (Egypt)
- $0.0036
- What the same number of characters costs when the message is about an order the customer already placed.
- The gap
- ≈18×
- Multiply by the number of sends your rules allow, per month, before you launch anything.
Source: Meta WhatsApp per-message rate card, Egypt, retrieved 2 November 2026; category, window and service-message rules from Meta developer documentation.
Meta bills these fees, not us, and we never mark them up. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions.
Control
Consent, caps and the cost, before you press send.
A recovery campaign can damage a phone number permanently. These are the limits that stop that.
- Opt-in is enforced at send time
- A contact without marketing consent is skipped and the skip is recorded, so you can see what the campaign did not do as well as what it did.
- Frequency caps
- Per customer, per campaign, per week. Checked when the message is about to send, not when the campaign was built.
- One stop word, everywhere
- An unsubscribe on any channel stops marketing on all of them, and the contact keeps receiving transactional messages about orders they placed.
- Estimated spend before launch
- The audience size times the published rate for each destination, shown with the rate it was calculated from.
Source: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, updated 23 September 2026.
What you need
Consent and an event. The rest is configuration.
- Cart events from your store, or a webhook from whatever holds the cart.
- Marketing opt-in recorded against the contact.
- One approved marketing template.
- A wait time, a frequency cap and a stop condition.
Questions buyers actually ask.
How much does cart recovery recover?
We do not publish a number. We have no customer data we could stand behind, and every public benchmark we found came from a vendor selling the feature. What is exactly knowable is the cost side: Meta's published rate for your market, times the number of sends your rules allow. Start there.
Can I send a sequence of three messages?
You can, and we will show you what each extra send costs before you turn it on. The default is one, because the template exists only to reopen a conversation that costs nothing to continue.
What if the customer never opted in?
They are skipped. Marketing templates without consent put the phone number at risk, and losing the number costs more than losing the cart.
Does the 24-hour window ever make this free?
If the customer messaged you within the last 24 hours, the follow-up is a service message instead of a marketing template. The automation checks that first for exactly this reason.
Does BlendDesk add a markup to Meta's fees?
No. Meta bills its message fees directly. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions, and the calculator shows Meta's side from the published rate card.
Price the campaign before you build it.
Book a demo and we will run your cart volumes through Meta's published rates, then show you the rules that decide which carts earn a message.