The revenue sitting in the abandoned carts
Orders abandoned - carts that held a real order and never paid - multiplied by their average order value is the revenue at stake. The defaults put it at $6,750: 150 carts at $45 each, printed as its own row between the basket value and the recoverable figure.
Only carts with an order in them belong in that count. Adding every session that left without buying inflates the figure with shoppers who were never going to pay, and chasing them produces sends without revenue.
Both inputs have a floor of zero, and a zero on either side stops the page with a prompt rather than a table: a basket worth nothing and a cart count of nothing both leave nothing to price.
The recovery rate wins back a share
A recovery flow - a reminder email, a discount, a checkout nudge - wins back a share of those carts. Multiply the abandoned revenue by that share and the result is the recoverable figure: at 30% of the default, $2,025.00 comes back in reach.
The rate applies to the baskets, not to the dollars directly, which is why the revenue line sits between the rate and the result in the table. Read downward and the arithmetic is visible: carts, basket value, revenue, rate, recoverable, lost.
The hero also reports the orders that share represents - 45 of the 150 defaults - because a recovery team plans in orders, while the finance side of the business plans in dollars.
The remainder is the part nobody invoices
What the recovery does not win back stays lost: $4,725.00 on the defaults. The page prints it separately because it is the quiet half - no invoice, no line item, just revenue that never arrived, which is exactly why it stays invisible until someone adds it up.
That remainder is the figure to weigh against the cost of recovery. If it is much larger than the emails and any discount cost to send, another reminder is a cheap experiment; if the rate is already thin, more budget buys a smaller and smaller slice.
The rate you enter is a measured number
The page starts at 30%, but the honest reading is that a recovery rate comes from your own flow: recovered orders divided by the carts the flow went out to. Recovery emails commonly land in the double digits, and the only number worth planning against is the one your funnel reports.
The field accepts anything from 0 to 100 and the table rounds the rate to a whole percent, while the arithmetic behind it keeps the full value, so a rate of 18.4% is displayed as 18% and still priced as 18.4%.
A discount offered to win the cart back is real spend and comes out of the recoverable figure. The page keeps its own arithmetic to the four lines; the comparison that decides whether to send subtracts the cost of the win-back from the revenue it reclaims.
What the recovery flow has to cost less than
A recovery flow is a purchase, and the figure it has to beat is the recoverable revenue on this page - not the size of the abandoned carts. A platform fee of $50 a month plus a 10% win-back discount still leaves money on the table against a $2,025 recoverable figure; the same flow against a $300 recoverable figure is a subscription that costs more than the carts it is chasing.
The discount is the part that gets left out of the pitch. Winning back a 30% share with a 10% code gives away a tenth of every cart it touches, and the customers who would have come back without the code take it anyway - so the flow earns less than the multiplication suggests, which is why the recoverable figure here is an upper bound and not a forecast.
Timing decides most of the difference between flows that look identical on paper. The first message inside the hour catches the visitor who was interrupted; the third message on day three catches almost nobody who was not already going to return. Sending more costs nothing per send and everything per subscriber who unsubscribes, so the marginal message is worth sending only while it keeps recovering more carts than it burns.
Count recovered orders, not clicks. An open or a click is a step, and the only denominator that compares one flow with another is the carts the flow actually reached. Measured against every abandoned cart, a flow that only went out to half of them looks twice as good as it is - and the same mistake turns a mediocre flow into a case study.
It is also how a flow with a 25% rate can beat one claiming 35%: the first went out to every cart and recovered a quarter of them, while the second only fires for carts above $80 and still quotes the headline number. Before comparing two flows, ask what each one leaves out of its denominator.
Danfio