Cart abandonment rate is one of the most quoted numbers in ecommerce, and one of the least examined. Most store owners treat it as a single, honest signal: a customer added items, then walked away. But a meaningful part of that number is not abandonment at all. It is a device switch that never got completed.
A shopper who never left
A shopper browsing on their phone during a commute is not making a purchase decision at that moment. They are building a shortlist. When they sit down at a laptop later that day, the plan was always to finish there. If the cart does not follow them, the platform records a second event: a new, empty session. The store sees two data points. The customer experienced one continuous decision that got interrupted by infrastructure, not by doubt.
The customer experienced one continuous decision that got interrupted by infrastructure, not by doubt.
Why the standard fix misses
This distinction matters because it changes what a store owner should actually fix. Cart recovery emails are built for the case where interest genuinely faded and needs to be reignited. They add friction (a delay, an inbox, a click back to the site) at the exact point where a shopper who never lost interest should not need to be won back at all. If the real problem is device continuity rather than cooling interest, an email sent six hours later is solving a problem the customer does not have.
What actually solves it
Persistent Cart addresses the device-continuity case directly. When a logged-in customer returns on any device, phone, tablet, or desktop, their cart is exactly where they left it. No re-adding items, no email round-trip, no assumption that they changed their mind. It does not replace cart recovery for shoppers who really did lose interest. It removes the false abandonment that recovery tools were never built to solve in the first place.
If your store serves customers who research on one device and buy on another, the gap between "cart abandonment" and "device switch" is worth a closer look before assuming every stalled cart needs to be won back.