What's a good abandoned-cart SMS recovery rate?
A good abandoned-cart SMS program recovers an order for roughly 3.3% of delivered texts. Across all active CartBoss stores from February 2024 to January 2025, 26.8% of delivered cart-recovery messages were clicked, and 12.3% of those clicks became a recovered order — 3.3% of delivered messages end to end.
Most "recovery rate" statistics in circulation come with no source, no date, and — worst of all — no denominator. A recovery rate per cart, per message sent, and per message delivered are three very different numbers, and vendors tend to quote whichever looks best. Ours is per delivered message, counted by CartBoss's own click-attribution: a recovered order only counts when the shopper clicked the link in a recovery text and then completed the purchase. That is the strictest common denominator, and it's the one you can actually act on.
The context that makes these numbers matter: roughly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned (Baymard Institute's long-running average of dozens of studies, 2024). Concretely, for every 1,000 recovery texts that reached a phone, stores in this aggregate saw 268 clicks and about 33 recovered orders — orders that would otherwise have been lost.
Methodology
Every figure on this page comes from CartBoss's own pre-aggregated production statistics, covering February 2024 through January 2025 — the most recent fully-aggregated 12-month window. Aggregates span thousands of stores; recovery is counted by product click-attribution; no store names or per-store figures appear anywhere.
The source is CartBoss's internal monthly stats system, which aggregates message-delivery counts, link-click counts, and recovered-order counts across every active store. We pulled those monthly aggregates read-only from the production database and summed twelve months. We say "February 2024 – January 2025" rather than "the trailing twelve months" because that is the most recent window our stats system has fully aggregated — precision about the window is part of the benchmark.
Attribution is the product's own: a recovered order is counted when a shopper clicks the tracked link in a cart-recovery text and completes the order. No last-touch modeling, no surveys, no "influenced revenue." If the shopper came back some other way, the order does not count toward these numbers — which means the benchmark errs on the conservative side.
Scale and anonymity: the aggregates span the entire active customer base — 5,203 active organizations running 4,200 live stores as of July 2026 — far above the minimum of 50 stores per metric we set for publishing any aggregate. No store names, and no per-store figures, appear in this data or this article.
Finally, an omission policy: several metrics that usually headline benchmark posts are missing here on purpose. We only publish figures we can measure cleanly from our own data — the section below covers what didn't make that cut, and why.
The benchmark funnel: delivered → clicked → recovered
The full funnel, measured on CartBoss's own production data: 1,999,408 texts delivered, 534,974 clicked (26.8%), 65,566 orders recovered. That works out to 12.3% of clicks converting and 3.3% of delivered messages ending in a recovered order — every figure below comes from the same window, February 2024 through January 2025.
| Metric | Value | How it's computed |
|---|---|---|
| SMS messages delivered | 1,999,408 | Sum of monthly delivered-message counts across all active stores |
| Link clicks | 534,974 | Sum of monthly link-click counts on recovery messages |
| Click-through rate | 26.8% | Clicks ÷ delivered messages |
| Recovered orders | 65,566 | Orders completed after the shopper clicked a recovery text (product click-attribution) |
| Click → recovered order | 12.3% | Recovered orders ÷ clicks |
| Delivered message → recovered order | 3.3% | Recovered orders ÷ delivered messages |
CartBoss production data, Feb 2024 – Jan 2025. Aggregated across thousands of stores (5,203 active organizations, 4,200 live stores as of July 2026); recovered orders counted by product click-attribution; no per-store figures.
The number that surprises people is the click-through rate. For marketing email, benchmark reports from Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor (2022) put click-through around 2–3% of delivered messages; abandoned-cart texts in this aggregate were clicked at 26.8%. That gap isn't magic — it's selection. A cart-recovery text goes to one shopper who just left a full cart, minutes ago, on the device the text arrives on. High intent plus perfect timing is what an abandoned-cart SMS is; the benchmark simply measures it.
Across the same window, CartBoss tracked 3,511,850 abandoned carts in total — including carts that were never messaged at all (no phone number, no SMS consent, or messaging switched off). Recovered orders amount to about 1.9% of that all-carts denominator. That is a tracking-coverage number, not a message-performance number: it says how many of all carts a store tracks come back via SMS, not how well the messages perform. Judge an SMS program on the funnel above.
The numbers we don't publish (and why)
CartBoss doesn't publish delivery rate, median time-to-recovery, or recovered-revenue benchmarks, because we can't measure them cleanly — and we won't publish what we can't measure. Plenty of vendors will quote you all three. Ask where the number comes from; if the answer is vague, treat it as sales copy.
Delivery rate. Our retained production data for this window can't reconstruct a clean delivered-versus-failed ratio, so there is no honest percentage to print. What we can say is that every funnel figure above is built on confirmed-delivered messages — the 1,999,408 count only includes texts our system recorded as delivered — so the benchmark isn't inflated by messages that never arrived.
Median time-to-recovery. Our raw cart-to-order timestamps can't isolate SMS-attributed recoveries from shoppers who simply completed checkout on their own a moment later. A median computed on that data would look impressively fast and mean nothing — exactly the kind of flattering, unfalsifiable number benchmark posts love. We'd rather skip it.
Recovered revenue. Our aggregated revenue statistics for this window failed our own consistency checks, and raw order values can't be cleanly tied to SMS attribution across dozens of currencies. So no "average recovered revenue per store" here. If we fix the measurement, we'll publish the figure — with its window and denominator attached.
This is the same stance we took in our SMS vs email ROI guide: distrust any precise-sounding benchmark that arrives without a named source, a date, and a denominator. That rule applies to this page too — which is why every number on it has all three.
How to beat the benchmark
Speed is the biggest lever: send the first text within the hour, while the cart is still on the shopper's mind. Keep the message short with one clear link, write it in the shopper's language, include the cart contents, and test send timing against your own numbers — not anyone's benchmark.
The funnel tells you where to work. Click-through (26.8% in the aggregate) is won or lost on timing and copy: a prompt, personal, single-link text in the shopper's own language beats a delayed, generic blast. Click-to-order (12.3% in the aggregate) is won on the landing side: the link should restore the exact cart, on mobile, with no login wall between the tap and the checkout button. If you need a starting point for the message itself, our abandoned-cart SMS templates are free, and the cart-recovery automation handles timing and language automatically.
Then measure yourself on the same three ratios — clicks per delivered message, orders per click, orders per delivered message — over a window long enough to trust. Our SMS ROI calculator turns those ratios and your message costs into a return figure, using your inputs rather than our benchmark. Beating the aggregate is nice; beating your own last quarter is the goal.