Conversion Kit: Cart Abandonment Recovery

Detects when a guest starts a booking and leaves without finishing, then brings them back with a recovery email and an on-site reminder bar the next time they visit.

What it does #

Cart Abandonment Recovery watches for booking intent on your site. When a guest begins checkout on a property but does not complete the booking, Conversion Kit treats that as an abandoned cart. It can then recover that guest two ways:

• Recovery email: after a delay you set, the guest gets an email nudging them back to finish the booking they started. This needs the guest’s email, captured during checkout.
• On-site reminder bar: when the guest returns to your site, a small reminder bar can resurface the property they left behind so they can pick up where they stopped. This works from the browser session alone and does not need the guest’s email. By default it appears after a short delay, once per browser session, stays off single property pages and search-results pages so it doesn’t compete with a booking already underway, and never appears on checkout. You can instead have it wait for exit intent, holding the card until the guest’s cursor heads for the top of the window, a last nudge on the way out rather than an early interruption; that only works with a mouse, so phones and tablets keep the delay-based reveal either way. If a guest has more than one abandoned cart, the card follows the newest one. What happens when the guest dismisses it depends on the When Dismissed setting below: by default a dismissal is permanent for that cart (and stops its recovery email too), so an older abandoned cart can resurface on the guest’s next visit; switch it to a temporary snooze if you would rather the card just come back later instead.

It is built to recapture the highest-intent guests you have, the ones who got all the way to checkout and then got distracted. Recovering even a fraction of them is some of the easiest revenue your site can earn.

The recovery email’s wording and look are yours to edit from Conversion Kit’s shared Emails section, alongside every other Conversion Kit email. You can rewrite the subject, headline, intro, button label, urgency line, and footer note, choose whether to show the trip total and a guest-review snippet, and optionally override the heading color, background color, button color, and logo for this email specifically. Before you rely on it, you can send a real test copy to any address to check how it reads and confirm it lands in the inbox.

The guest’s email is captured during the booking flow, and the tool stops sending once a guest completes the booking. A guest whose email was captured at checkout but never verified receives one recovery email at most. Every recovery email also carries a Stop these reminders link, and a guest who uses it never receives another cart recovery email.

How recoveries are counted #

Every button in a recovery email carries a private, signed tag and a utm_source=cart_recovery campaign tag, so a click on that exact reminder can be recorded. A booking counts as recovered when the guest you emailed clicked the reminder link and booked the same stay within 7 days. Bookings that fall short of that rule are reported on their own lines in Insights: clicked the on-site reminder, emailed with no click recorded, or tracked and returned on their own. Each confirmed reservation is credited to one cart at most. Reminder clicks do not replace a referral partner’s credit, and they are left out of the Partner Commission Report.

How guest accounts fit in #

The on-site reminder bar works on its own from the browser session, no guest identity needed. The recovery email is the piece that needs to know who to email: it relies on the guest identity layer to link a returning visitor’s session to the email address captured during checkout. See Guest Identity and Guest Portal for how that profile is built and persists.

How to turn it on #

1. Open the Conversion Kit tools #

Go to HomeRunner > Conversion Kit and find Cart Abandonment Recovery in the tool list.

2. Enable the tool #

Toggle Cart Abandonment Recovery on. Conversion Kit ships with selectors tuned to the standard HomeRunner booking component, so tracking works out of the box on a standard setup.

3. Confirm your email delivery #

Recovery emails send through your site’s email, so make sure your site can send email reliably.

4. Customize the recovery email (optional) #

Open Conversion Kit > Emails and find Cart Abandonment Recovery to edit the wording and look. Anywhere a wording field can name the listing or your site, type {property} for the listing name and {site} for your site name, and Conversion Kit fills them in per guest. From the same panel you can send a live test copy with sample booking details to any address. If you leave this panel alone, the email uses its built-in defaults.

Settings #

• Recovery Delay (Minutes): how long to wait after abandonment before the recovery email goes out (default 60).
• Max Recovery Emails: the most recovery emails sent per abandoned cart (default 2). A guest whose email you captured at checkout but who has not verified it receives one email at most, whatever this is set to.
• Email Cooldown (Hours): minimum wait between two recovery emails (default 24).
• Recovery Coupon Code: optional, up to 64 characters. Create the coupon in your booking system first. The recovery email shows the code, the booking link applies it automatically, and bookings that redeem it count as verified email recoveries. Leave it empty to turn it off.
• Recovery Coupon Note: text shown with the code, for example “Save 5% when you complete your booking”. Describe the discount exactly as it is set up in your booking system.
• Book Now / Checkout / Success Selectors: the page elements the tool watches to detect that a guest started, reached checkout on, or finished a booking. The defaults match the standard HomeRunner component and are scoped to your site’s real checkout page. Change these only if your site uses a custom checkout.
• Enable On-site Reminder: show the returning-visitor reminder bar (default on).
• Reminder Delay (Seconds): how long after a return visit the reminder bar appears once it is set to reveal on a delay (default 3).
• Reveal Trigger: whether the reminder card appears after the reveal delay above (the default), or waits for exit intent, when the guest’s cursor heads for the top of the window as if to close the tab or type a new address. Exit intent only works with a mouse, so phones and tablets always use the delay-based reveal regardless of this setting; use Hide on Mobile if you would rather keep them quiet entirely.
• Show Frequency: “Once per visit” shows the reminder card a single time per browser session, so a returning guest isn’t reminded on every page (default and recommended). Switch to “On every page until dismissed” to restore the original always-show behavior.
• Where It Shows: off by default, so the card stays off single property pages and search-results pages, where the guest is already booking and a reminder for a different listing would just compete for attention. Turn it on to also show the card there. The card never shows on checkout pages either way.
• Hide on Mobile: off by default. Turn it on to stop the reminder card from appearing on mobile devices, where screen space is tighter and the card can crowd the sticky booking bar.
• When Dismissed: what dismissing the reminder card means. Never show that cart again (the default) retires that cart for good and stops its recovery email too. Hide for this visit only and Hide for a number of days (1 to 90, default 7) only hide the card, so the recovery email still sends and the same abandoned cart can prompt again later.
• Card Layout: whether the reminder bar shows a property photo, an icon, or text only. Properties with no photo fall back to the icon automatically.
• Icon: an optional custom icon shown on the reminder card in place of the default one.
• Message: the reminder card’s wording. Leave blank to use the built-in default.
• Button Label: the text on the reminder card’s own call-to-action button. This is separate from the recovery email’s Button Label below.
• Show Dates & Guests: includes the guest’s chosen dates and party size on the reminder card (default on).
• Clickable Card: makes the whole card clickable, not just its button (default on).
• Accent Color: the color used for the reminder bar’s button and icon (default #ff385c).
• Preview: the Preview the card on your site button opens a real property page with the card forced on, using your saved settings. Only logged-in admins see it, and it records nothing, so save your changes first.

If you had not touched the Checkout selector, it was corrected automatically for you in an earlier update, no action needed on your end. If you had already entered your own custom selector there, it was left exactly as you set it.

After that correction, you may see fewer checkout events reported for your site. That’s expected, not a problem: the old default also matched an element that every property page ships (hidden), so simply viewing a property was being counted the same as a guest reaching checkout. The corrected default only matches your site’s real checkout page, so the numbers going forward reflect guests who actually got to checkout rather than page views.

Recovery email content and appearance #

These live in Conversion Kit > Emails, under Cart Abandonment Recovery. Every wording field below accepts the {property} and {site} tokens. Leave a wording field blank to restore its default text, and leave a color or logo field blank to use your Global brand settings, or the built-in defaults if you have not set any.

Tips #

• Leave the selectors at their defaults unless you have customized your checkout. They are tuned to the standard HomeRunner booking component, and the wrong selector means nothing gets tracked.
• A 60-minute delay is a good starting point. Soon enough to catch the guest while intent is warm, late enough to avoid emailing someone who simply stepped away for a minute.
• If you want the on-site reminder to work harder, turn on Where It Shows to also surface it while a guest is browsing properties or search results, not only on other pages.
• Exit intent is worth trying if the delay-based reveal feels like it interrupts guests too early; it waits for a real signal that the guest is leaving instead of guessing on a timer.
• Send a test to yourself after editing the email so you see the exact wording, colors, and logo a guest would receive, and so you can confirm it reaches the inbox rather than spam.
• If you would rather the reminder card come back and prompt a guest again later instead of retiring for good, switch When Dismissed to the day-based snooze instead of the default permanent dismissal.
• Pair Cart Abandonment Recovery with Booking Reminder to cover both the guest who started checkout and the guest who was only browsing.