How to set up abandoned cart emails in HubSpot for a Shopify store

Someone adds three items to their cart, gets to checkout, and leaves. If your store runs on Shopify and your marketing runs on HubSpot, you can follow up automatically with the exact products they left behind. I’ve built this for a direct-to-consumer brand where abandoned cart recovery brings back more than $750,000 a week. The setup isn’t hard, but a few details decide whether it earns money or annoys people.

What you need first

• HubSpot’s Shopify data sync. It’s available on every HubSpot plan. Shopify’s abandoned checkouts come into HubSpot as cart records, one way, from Shopify to HubSpot. After the first sync, changes arrive within about 10 minutes.
• Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. HubSpot’s cart email module needs one of these, and it only works inside a cart-based workflow.

If you’re on Marketing Hub Starter or the free tools, use Shopify’s built-in abandoned checkout email instead. It’s cheaper than upgrading HubSpot for this one feature.

How the data arrives

Each abandoned checkout becomes a cart in HubSpot, linked to the contact by email address. Three limits are worth knowing before you build:

• Product variants don’t sync, so the email can’t show “blue, size medium.”
• Shopify metafields don’t sync.
• A checkout without an email address has no contact to follow up with.

If you set up custom field mappings for carts before April 1, 2025, check them. HubSpot removed some cart fields and added others on that date, and older custom mappings need reconfiguring. Custom mappings also require Data Hub Starter or above.

Timing the emails

I use three emails:

1. About 2 hours after the checkout is abandoned. A plain reminder showing the cart. No discount.
2. 24 hours. Answer the likely hesitation, such as shipping, returns or how the product works.
3. 72 hours. If the margin allows it, add the discount here and only here.

Putting the discount in the first email teaches customers to abandon carts on purpose. Holding it for the last email keeps your margin on everyone who would have bought anyway.

HubSpot users on the Community report that a checkout counts as abandoned after about an hour, and that you can’t adjust that window through the Shopify sync. Plan the first delay around it.

The two filters you build on day one

1. Purchase check. Before every email, branch on whether the customer has completed an order since the cart was created. If they have, end the workflow. Nothing loses trust faster than “You forgot something!” the day after someone paid.
2. Unsubscribe and opt-out respect. Cart emails are marketing emails. Contacts who haven’t opted in, or who have unsubscribed, shouldn’t get them.

Build both before you turn the workflow on. Adding them later means some customers already got the wrong email.

Things the sync can’t do

You can’t filter cart emails by product line through the sync alone, and you can’t fine-tune when a cart counts as abandoned. If you need either, it takes branching logic on cart properties, the Carts API, or a third-party tool. HubSpot also won’t let you A/B test an email that contains the cart module.

Check it’s working

Once a week for the first month, compare carts created, carts that received email one, and carts that became orders. If carts are coming in but no emails go out, the workflow trigger or the opt-in filter is usually the cause. If emails go out but nobody comes back, look at the first email’s timing and subject line before you reach for a discount.