Share a Cart gets filed under "social sharing" more often than it should. That framing undersells what actually happens when a customer uses it, and it is worth separating from the tools it gets compared to most often: cart recovery emails.
What a Share a Cart link actually carries
A recovery email is a message about a cart: it describes what was left behind and asks the customer to come back and finish it. A Share a Cart link is not a message about a cart, it is the cart. The link carries a reference to the exact state someone built, items, quantities, variants, whatever was selected, and opening it on any device loads that same state directly into the opener's own cart, ready for checkout. Nobody has to remember what they picked, log in on the right device, or re-add anything by hand. That is the real difference between the two tools: one reconstructs intent from memory, the other hands it over directly.
Two different starting points
A recovery email exists to re-engage someone who left. It assumes cooled interest and works to rebuild it: a reminder, sometimes a discount, sent to someone who is not currently looking at your store. Share a Cart starts from the opposite position. The customer who generates the link is not leaving, they are actively building a cart they intend for someone else to complete, or to finish themselves from a different context. The person who receives that link does not arrive at your homepage to be persuaded.
They arrive at checkout, with the exact items already loaded, at the exact moment someone chose to send it to them.
Where this actually shows up
This shows up in a few concrete situations that have nothing to do with abandonment. A shopper fills a cart on their laptop during lunch, then sends the link to a partner over a messaging app for a yes before checking out. A parent builds a cart for a teenager and hands off the link so they can finish it with their own payment method. A purchasing coordinator loads a supplier's cart with the items a team requested, then forwards it to whoever holds the company card. None of these is the original shopper coming back to an abandoned cart. Each one is a shopper handing an already-decided cart to the person who needs to be involved before it becomes an order.
What makes this work is that the link only carries the cart contents, not a session or an account. The partner, teenager, or purchasing coordinator who opens it does not need to log into anyone else's account or use anyone else's payment details to finish the order, they complete it in their own checkout, with their own payment method. That is what actually separates Share a Cart from workarounds like forwarding a screenshot or sharing a password: the person choosing what to buy and the person paying for it can be two different people, without either one giving up their own login.
Why measuring it like a recovery win hides the value
A Share a Cart order and a recovery email order can look identical in a sales report, both show up as a completed order attached to a cart that could have looked abandoned along the way, and that similarity is exactly what makes the difference easy to lose. The two orders come from different moments in the customer's decision, though. A recovery email is a re-activation attempt: it goes out after interest has already had time to cool, trying to bring someone back to a decision they stepped away from. A Share a Cart link works at the opposite point, right when the cart was built, while intent is at its highest, handed straight to the person whose input was needed next. One way to keep that difference visible without inventing a new metric: tag orders that came in through a shared cart link separately from orders that came in through a recovery email click, and treat them as answering different questions rather than folding both into a single "recovered abandoned cart" number.
The practical implication for a store: the two tools do not compete for the same customer moment, and measuring them the same way hides what Share a Cart is actually worth. A shared cart link that converts is not a saved abandonment, it is a purchase decision made by someone else and handed to you already resolved.