Unlike Shopify, cart abandonment links from BigCommerce do not encode the contents of each shoppers cart. This means that, without Instant Audiences, there is a high chance that by the time a shopper clicks the links in your cart abandonment emails, their cart has expired, and they'll land on your checkout with no products in their cart. This harms overall conversion rates and therefore revenue for your website.
To get around this problem, Instant Audiences generates a new cart for each abandoned shopper, encoding the contents of their cart in the URL sent by your email marketing software.
This feature increases the likelihood of shoppers converting on your website after receiving a cart abandonment link.
Because Instant Audiences creates new carts via BigCommerce's API, this feature may distort BigCommerce's inbuilt abandoned cart reporting, making it report more carts (and therefore more abandoned carts). We generate a cart once for every visitor that performs either an add to cart, or a checkout started event. Once it is generated, we cache that new cart. If the customer adds an item or removes an item from their cart, it then gets regenerated and re-cached.
We recommend merchants use a tool like Google Analytics to accurately track conversion rates and abandoned carts, though our team can disable this feature for merchants who would rather use BigCommerce's inbuilt abandoned cart reporting, noting that this will negatively impact revenue generated by your cart abandonment flows.