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Cart abandonment
Prism watches the e-commerce journey for two abandonment patterns and emits an event for each once its threshold passes with no purchase.
Definitions
| Event | Fires when | Default threshold |
|---|---|---|
CheckoutAbandon | Checkout was started, but no purchase followed for that cart | 4 hours |
CartAbandon | An item was added to the cart, checkout was never started, and no purchase followed | 24 hours |
Both thresholds are configurable per client (1–24 hours) from the Adsidian dashboard if the defaults don't fit your sales cycle.
CartAbandon is the segment platform order webhooks can't see at all — there's no checkout record for Shopify or any other platform to report, since checkout never started. It only exists because Prism is watching cart activity directly on your site.
Each event fires once per abandoned cart or checkout — reaching the threshold doesn't re-fire it on every later check.
What the events contain
- The cart or checkout's line items (
contents), matching the commerce properties shape valueandcurrency- A recovery URL, when the platform provides one (Shopify's abandoned-checkout link, for example)
- A hashed email, if one was captured during the session
Recovered revenue
If a purchase eventually completes for a cart that was already marked abandoned, Prism links the two and marks the abandonment recovered rather than leaving it as a permanent loss. Recovered-revenue totals and rate show up alongside your funnel numbers in the dashboard — a useful check on whether abandonment is actually costing you revenue or just measuring visitors who came back on their own.
How to use this
Funnel reporting. ViewItem → AddToCart → BeginCheckout → Purchase conversion rates, abandoned-cart value, and recovery rate give you a picture of where the funnel leaks without needing session replay or DOM recordings — which Prism deliberately doesn't do.
Meta retargeting. You don't need to do anything extra for this: Meta's Advantage+ catalog retargeting already keys off AddToCart and InitiateCheckout versus Purchase, so abandoners become retargetable automatically as long as your content_ids match your product catalog — see the catalog ID note. If you want abandonment specifically as its own custom-audience source, ask your agency to opt CheckoutAbandon into ad-platform fan-out from the dashboard; by default it stays first-party like the rest of the funnel events, per the auto-capture policy.
What Prism doesn't do
Prism measures and attributes abandonment — it does not send recovery emails or SMS. That's deliberately out of scope: it's your email platform's job, not your tracking layer's. Pair Prism's abandonment data (including the recovery URL, where available) with a platform like Klaviyo to actually message abandoners — Prism tells you who abandoned and what it was worth, and gives you the pieces to trigger a recovery flow elsewhere.
Next
- E-commerce events — the full journey event reference
- Installing on Shopify — abandoned-checkout data on Shopify comes from the custom app in Step 2