A common surprise for merchants reviewing their abandoned checkouts: the shopper appears to have ticked "Email me with news and offers", yet the checkout's buyer_accepts_marketing field is false, and recovery tools that require consent skip the cart. This isn't a bug in your store — it follows from how Shopify records consent.
What Shopify's documentation says
Shopify's Help Center page on collecting customer contact information states that a customer's consent is captured at checkout when they select the marketing checkbox and proceed — by selecting Pay now on one-page checkout, or Continue to shipping on three-page checkout.
Since one-page checkout became Shopify's default in 2023, most stores run the single-page layout. Combine the two facts and the implication follows directly: on a one-page checkout, consent is recorded at Pay now — and an abandoned checkout is, by definition, one where the shopper never reached that point. So an abandoned cart from a new shopper will usually carry no recorded consent, even if the box was visibly ticked in the browser.
What we observed in testing
In our own tests on a development store (July 2026), the checkouts/create and checkouts/update webhooks for a fresh email address consistently arrived with buyer_accepts_marketing: false and no customer object, regardless of the checkbox state on screen — until the purchase was completed. We can't speak for every store configuration, but the behavior matched the documentation quoted above.
Why this matters for cart recovery
- Shopify's own abandoned checkout automation is, by default, only sent to customers subscribed to email marketing — which is one reason merchants often see few automatic recovery emails go out. (More on what the built-in email does and doesn't do in this article.)
- Any recovery app that strictly requires recorded consent will skip most abandoned carts from first-time shoppers, for the same reason.
- Returning customers who subscribed earlier (for example, during a previous completed purchase) do carry consent, so their abandoned carts can be emailed under a consent-required policy.
Options merchants have
There's no single right answer — the appropriate choice depends on where your shoppers are and how you weigh deliverability, regulation, and recovery volume:
- Send only to recorded consent. The most conservative policy; expect it to cover mostly returning subscribers.
- Send to all abandoners with a clear unsubscribe. A widespread industry practice in opt-out jurisdictions; rules differ by region (for example, several EU countries require prior consent for marketing email), so review the requirements that apply to your customers. This isn't legal advice.
- Use channels with their own opt-in. Web push permission is granted in the browser, separately from email consent.
Related reading: when Shopify actually creates an abandoned checkout.