Here’s a number that stings: for every ten customers who start an online order at your café, six or seven of them may never finish it. That’s not a sign your site is broken—it’s the baseline for ecommerce everywhere. The question isn’t whether people abandon carts; it’s how many you can win back.
This guide covers why café customers bail mid-order, what the real numbers look like, and a concrete recovery playbook using the tools you already have on Square—plus where a branded app quietly outperforms email.
How bad is cart abandonment, really?
The most-cited benchmark comes from the Baymard Institute, which aggregates 50 separate studies into an average online cart abandonment rate of about 70%. Food and grocery runs a little better than the all-ecommerce average—roughly 62–65%—but that still means the majority of started carts don’t convert.
Read that as opportunity, not doom. If your Square Online site is doing $8,000 a month in completed orders at a 65% abandonment rate, there’s a large pool of started orders sitting just on the other side of checkout. You don’t need to recover all of them. Clawing back even 10–15% of abandoned carts is real, incremental revenue on traffic you already earned.
Why café customers abandon orders
Baymard’s data on why people abandon is the useful part, because most of it is fixable:
- “Just browsing / not ready to buy” — about 43%. Unavoidable in part, but a reminder catches the ones who genuinely meant to come back.
- Checkout too long or complicated — about 18%. Every extra screen and form field bleeds conversions.
- Unexpected extra costs (fees, taxes, delivery) shown late in checkout — a top reason across every study.
- Forced account creation before checkout.
- Payment friction — no Apple Pay or Google Pay, or having to re-type a card.
For a café, layer on one more: cart size is small. Someone ordering a $6 latte has near-zero tolerance for a five-step checkout or a surprise $2 service fee. The bar for “not worth it, I’ll just walk in” is very low, so friction that a $200 electronics buyer would tolerate kills a coffee order instantly.
Fix the checkout before you chase the cart
Recovery emails matter, but the highest-leverage work is making the checkout so smooth that fewer carts get abandoned in the first place. Do these first:
- Show all fees upfront. If you charge a service or packaging fee, surface it on the item or cart page, not at the final step. Late surprises are the number-one conversion killer. (See how to price online ordering without a nasty surprise.)
- Cut checkout steps. Baymard found the average checkout has ~23 form fields when it could work with 12–14. Turn off every optional field you don’t truly need.
- Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay. A wallet button skips card entry entirely and is the single biggest mobile-checkout speed-up. Here’s how to turn on Apple Pay and Google Pay for café mobile ordering.
- Don’t force account creation. Offer guest checkout; ask for the account (or loyalty sign-up) after the order is placed.
- Set honest prep times. A “ready in 25 min” during a rush sends people to the café next door. Match the promise to reality.
Use Square’s abandoned-cart recovery
Square Online has a built-in abandoned-cart email, and as of early 2025 it lives inside Square Marketing so all your customer email is in one place. The mechanics, per Square’s abandoned-cart documentation:
- Set the wait time before the reminder sends (a short delay—an hour or two—tends to catch people while intent is still warm).
- Attach a coupon to the reminder. A small, time-boxed incentive (“here’s 10% off—finish your order”) measurably lifts recovery, and Square lets you track coupon usage to see if it’s paying off.
- Know the limit: Square doesn’t natively send a full multi-email drip. You get one strong automated reminder; if you want a follow-up, you build it as a separate Square Marketing campaign.
One caveat worth being honest about: abandoned-cart email only works if you captured the email. That means the customer got far enough into checkout to enter it, or is already on your list. So the recovery engine and your customer-list building are the same project—the bigger your list, the more carts you can chase.
Recovery channels compared
Email is the default, but it’s not the only lever. Here’s the honest trade-off.
| Channel | Reach / open rate | Setup effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abandoned-cart email (Square Marketing) | Modest open rates; free with Square Online | Low (built in) | The standard baseline every café should turn on |
| Coupon in the email | Higher conversion than a plain reminder | Low | Nudging price-sensitive abandoners over the line |
| SMS reminder | High open rate; needs consent | Medium (compliance) | Time-sensitive nudges—but mind CASL / consent rules |
| Push notification (branded app) | Highest direct-to-phone reach | Needs an app | Fast, free reminders to app users with a saved cart |
| Saved cart + one-tap reorder (branded app) | Removes the friction entirely | Needs an app | Regulars who order the same thing repeatedly |
Where a branded app changes the game
The deepest fix for abandonment isn’t a better reminder—it’s a checkout with almost nothing left to abandon. That’s the structural advantage of a branded app over a web store:
- The customer stays logged in with a saved payment method and address, so a repeat order is one or two taps, not a fresh checkout.
- The cart persists across sessions—open the app tomorrow and it’s still there.
- Push notifications reach the phone directly and reliably beat email open rates, so the reminder itself is far more likely to be seen. (More on why in push notifications for café customer retention and email vs. SMS vs. push.)
That combination is what Tany is built for—a branded iOS and Android ordering app on your existing Square POS with saved carts, built-in loyalty, and push, live in about a day for $99 CAD/month per location at 0% commission. It’s one way to shrink the abandonment problem structurally; a well-tuned Square Online checkout plus the Square Marketing email is a perfectly good starting point. Do the free stuff first, measure your recovery rate, and upgrade the experience when the volume justifies it.
A simple recovery playbook
Put it together in order of effort-to-payoff:
- This week: show fees upfront, cut optional checkout fields, and enable Apple Pay / Google Pay.
- This week: turn on the Square Marketing abandoned-cart email with a short wait time and a small coupon.
- This month: grow your customer list so more carts are recoverable at all.
- When volume justifies it: move regulars to a branded app with saved carts and push, so the reminder and the reorder both take one tap.
You will never recover every cart—nobody does. But treating abandonment as a fixable funnel instead of a fact of life turns a scary 65% into a steady stream of orders you’d otherwise have left on the table.