FIELD NOTES

Building A Chat Agent For Ecommerce: The Cart Recovery Playbook

A Shopify store doing $4M ARR added a chat agent on the cart page. Recovered 11.3% of abandoned carts in 60 days. Here is the prompt and the funnel.

How the post opens

A Shopify store we work with does about 4M ARR. Their abandoned cart sequence had stagnated at 6 percent recovery. We added a chat agent on the cart page that asked one question. Sixty days later, recovery was 11.3 percent. It was the funnel design around the AI.

What it argues

It was the funnel design around the AI. The failure modes we have learned to engineer around Five failure modes show up in this category over and over. A prompt that worked in week one starts producing off-brand replies by week four because the model behind it silently versioned. Fix: pin the model version, run a weekly voice-drift eval against 50 canonical scenarios, alert on a 3-point deviation. The KB updated, the embeddings did not.

Filed under

Why this one exists

A Shopify store doing $4M ARR added a chat agent on the cart page. Recovered 11.3% of abandoned carts in 60 days. Here is the prompt and the funnel. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.