Short answer: yes. Shopify includes an abandoned checkout email for the Online Store and Buy Button sales channels, at no extra cost. Whether it does enough for your store depends on a few defaults that are easy to miss. Everything below links to Shopify's own documentation.
What it does
The automation sends a single email containing a link back to the shopper's checkout. According to Shopify's documentation of the current automation, you can edit the subject line, preview text, sender address and template (logo, colours), and you can add a discount to the email.
There are currently two versions. The legacy email lives under Settings → Checkout; the newer one is an automation in the Shopify Messaging app (Apps → Messaging → Automations), whose workflow — including the wait time — is edited in Shopify Flow. Shopify's page carries a caution worth repeating: switching to the new automation is a permanent change.
Who receives it by default
This is the default most merchants don't know about. Shopify's documentation states: "By default, the abandoned checkout automation is only sent to customers that are subscribed to email marketing. To send the email to all customers, you can edit the To: field of the email and select All customers."
Combined with how consent is recorded at checkout — it's only saved once the shopper presses Pay now, so most abandoned checkouts from first-time shoppers carry no recorded consent (details in this article) — the default setting reaches a small share of the people in your abandoned checkouts list. Whether to widen it to "All customers" is a policy decision for your store and your jurisdiction, not a technical one.
When it sends
The same page states that a newly created abandoned checkout automation "defaults to a 10 hour wait time before the email is sent to customers"; if you migrate from the legacy email, your previous settings are carried over. The delay is a fixed interval you choose — the automation doesn't look at when your customers tend to shop. (We've written about why that matters in when is the best time to send an abandoned cart email.)
Where it stops
All of the following come from Shopify's Help Center pages on recovering abandoned checkouts and the current automation:
- It needs an email address. If you let shoppers enter a phone number instead of an email at checkout and they do, the email can't be sent.
- It only covers abandoned checkouts. Shoppers who filled a cart but never entered contact details aren't in the list at all — see abandoned cart vs. abandoned checkout.
- It's one email, one channel. The automation is an email; web push or SMS aren't part of it.
- Online Store and Buy Button only. Abandoned checkouts from Shopify POS, Shop or third-party sales channels don't receive it.
- Several documented skip conditions: the shopper completed a purchase before the send, a payment processing error occurred, your store doesn't ship to the address, none of the products are available, every product is free, or Shopify Payments blocked the attempt as high risk.
- Three-month retention: abandoned checkouts older than three months are deleted from the admin automatically.
When an app is worth adding
If the built-in email covers what you need, use it — it's free and already there. Apps in this category generally add some combination of: more than one reminder, a second channel such as web push for shoppers who don't open email, send timing based on when your customers are actually active rather than a fixed delay, and an explicit setting for who may be contacted. That's what Cartback does, on a flat monthly price; the rest of this blog explains the reasoning behind each piece.