The situation
The situation
A Shopify-based e-commerce brand was manually following up on abandoned carts using a basic email sequence set up by their email platform. The sequence wasn't personalised, it fired on a fixed delay regardless of cart value, and someone still had to monitor it. When things got busy, follow-ups slipped. Around 60% of abandoned leads were going cold with no contact at all.
The complication
The complication
The owner had looked at off-the-shelf solutions — Klaviyo flows, Shopify email apps — but none of them could combine email, WhatsApp, and cart-value-based logic without significant technical configuration they didn't have bandwidth for. They needed a system that could think slightly, not just fire scheduled messages.
What we built
The system, component by component
A cart abandonment trigger in n8n that listens to Shopify webhooks in real time
Logic layer that segments carts by value (under $50, $50–$200, $200+) and assigns different recovery paths to each
Personalised email sequences generated by OpenAI using product names, cart total, and customer history
WhatsApp Business integration for high-value carts (over $150) that adds a second recovery channel
A live recovery dashboard showing recovery rate, revenue recovered, and sequence performance by cart tier
Under the hood
Technical note
The entire pipeline runs on n8n hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS. OpenAI handles the copy personalisation for each email — not just name/product insertion but tone variation based on whether it's the first, second, or third touchpoint. WhatsApp messages go through the official WhatsApp Business Cloud API, keeping the brand compliant.
Stack used
What changed
What changed
The owner no longer thinks about abandoned carts. The system monitors, segments, messages, and reports — without any manual intervention. The 34% recovery rate was measured by the client over the first 90 days of operation against an 8-week baseline of manual follow-up.
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