Build an Abandoned Checkout Recovery Flow, Start to Finish

"Revenue infrastructure" is suddenly a category. A tool called LARP showed up on Hacker News recently pitching itself as revenue infrastructure for serious founders, and plenty of people nodded along. Fair enough. Getting paid is the whole point.

But if you run a small app or store, most of what revenue infrastructure actually means for you is three or four boring automations. The highest-return one is abandoned checkout recovery. Someone added items, reached checkout, and left. If you email them within a few hours, a chunk of them come back. Typical recovery rates for this kind of flow are 10 to 20% of abandoned orders. For a small store, that's real money for half a day of work.

Here's the full build, start to finish.

Step 1: Payments (already done)

If you're selling on DontCode, payments are already wired. KakaoPay, Toss Payments, and PayPal are built in. You toggle them on in the Payments tab and the platform handles merchant keys and webhooks. Which means the platform already knows which checkouts started and which ones completed. You don't build tracking. It's there.

Step 2: The scheduled job

Create a cron job that runs every 2 hours. You don't write the code, you describe it: "Find checkouts that started between 2 and 24 hours ago and never completed. Send each customer the recovery email." Scheduling, retries, and auth are the platform's problem.

Step 3: The email

Outbound email is built in. No SMTP setup, no deliverability tuning, no third-party email account. Keep the message short: their name, what was in their cart, one link back to checkout. If your first draft sounds stiff, the AI rewrite does a decent job loosening it up.

Step 4: The follow-up and the exit

One reminder is good, two is better, three is spam. Add a second, softer nudge at 48 hours. Then define the exits: once they purchase, or once 7 days pass, they leave the flow. Done.

That's the whole build. No queue system, no email service integration, no webhook debugging at 1 AM.

The reason this takes an afternoon instead of a sprint is that the pieces, scheduled jobs, payments, and email, come preconfigured on every project. You're not integrating services. You're describing a flow between things that already talk to each other. So many stores build some version of this that we keep it as a documented recipe.

So before you evaluate a revenue infrastructure stack, build the boring automation first. It'll probably pay for itself by next week.

If you want to try it, DontCode is where I'd start, obviously. More build walkthroughs on the blog.