Business

How Kyle Bigley Turns Cart Abandonment Into Revenue for Growing SMB Brands

November 7, 2025

By: Joshua Bonnell

Picture this: A customer spends twenty minutes browsing your online store, carefully selecting products, maybe even comparing sizes and colors. They add everything to their cart, start the checkout process, and then… poof. They’re gone. Cart abandoned. Sale lost.

If you’re an ecommerce business owner, this scenario probably makes your stomach turn. Cart abandonment isn’t just a minor inconvenience. It’s a $4.6 trillion challenge that’s impacting businesses, one abandoned cart at a time.

Kyle Bigley knows this pain intimately. As a former dropshipper who built and sold a business that hit $30-40K monthly revenue, he watched potential customers slip away daily. But instead of accepting cart abandonment as “just part of ecommerce,” Kyle decided to address it.

Today, his SMS platform TxtCart has helped over 3,000 Shopify brands recover millions in lost revenue. We’re talking about $100 million in revenue generated for customers who were ready to write off those abandoned carts as lost causes.

The $4.6 Trillion Problem Nobody Talks About

The average cart abandonment rate across all industries hovers around 70%. That means seven out of ten people who show enough interest to add items to their cart never actually complete the purchase.

These aren’t random browsers. These are people who’ve already decided they want your product. They’ve invested time, made decisions, and taken action. Yet somehow, the vast majority still walk away empty-handed.

For small and mid-sized businesses, this can be devastating. Unlike enterprise companies with massive marketing budgets, SMB brands can’t afford to lose 70% of their interested customers. Every abandoned cart represents potential revenue that could make or break their month.

“Most small businesses are bootstrapping their way to success,” Kyle explains. “They can’t afford to let revenue walk out the door. When someone abandons a cart, that’s not just a lost sale. It’s lost rent money, lost inventory investment, and a lost opportunity to grow.”

The traditional solution? Email. Send a “You left something in your cart!” message and hope for the best. But email open rates for cart abandonment campaigns average around 20%. Even if someone opens the email, there’s no certainty they’ll act on it.

Why SMS Changes Everything

While everyone else was doubling down on email, Kyle started looking at SMS differently.

“When’s the last time you ignored a text message?” Kyle asks. “SMS has a 98% open rate and a 36% click-through rate. Compare that to email’s 20% open rate and 2.3% click-through rate. It’s not even close.”

But Kyle’s insight went deeper than just open rates. He realized that SMS isn’t just a more effective channel. It’s a fundamentally different type of communication that allows for real conversations.

“Email is one-directional. You send a message and hope someone responds. SMS is conversational by nature. People expect to be able to text back, ask questions, and get immediate answers. That’s where the real difference happens.”

This led to the creation of TxtCart, but not as another SMS blast tool. Kyle built a conversational SMS platform that treats each abandoned cart as the beginning of a relationship, not the end of a transaction.

The TxtCart Difference: Conversations, Not Campaigns

Most SMS marketing platforms treat text messages like email. They send generic, one-size-fits-all messages to large lists and call it a day. TxtCart takes a completely different approach.

When someone abandons their cart on a TxtCart-enabled store, they don’t just get a generic “Come back and buy!” message. They get a personalized text that feels like it’s coming from a helpful store associate who noticed they left something behind.

But here’s where it gets interesting. If the customer texts back with questions, concerns, or objections, TxtCart’s AI doesn’t just send a canned response. It understands context, maintains the brand’s voice, and can actually help solve problems in real-time.

“We’re not just recovering abandoned carts,” Kyle explains. “We’re building relationships. When someone texts back asking about sizing, shipping, or product details, our AI can answer those questions immediately. It’s like having a personal shopping assistant available 24/7.”

The results speak for themselves. Brands using TxtCart see an average of 21% of their total sales attributed to SMS conversations. That’s not just cart recovery. That’s new revenue that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

Real Results for Real Businesses

The impact of TxtCart’s conversational approach extends across thousands of small and mid-sized ecommerce brands. These companies represent the core of the direct-to-consumer economy: hair care brands, fitness companies, specialty retailers, and emerging product lines that are building their customer base one conversation at a time.

Unlike enterprise companies with massive marketing budgets and dedicated retention teams, these growing SMB brands operate with tighter margins and smaller teams. For them, every customer interaction matters, and every recovered sale can make a meaningful difference to their bottom line.

The platform’s focus on conversation-driven SMS has proven particularly effective for brands in competitive markets where customer acquisition costs continue to rise. By turning abandoned cart moments into genuine customer service opportunities, these businesses can maximize the value of the traffic they’ve already paid to acquire.

“The brands we work with aren’t Amazon,” Kyle says. “They’re entrepreneurs building something from scratch. They’re dropshippers testing new products. They’re established brands looking to grow. They need tools that work immediately and deliver real ROI.”

This approach has resonated across diverse product categories, from beauty and wellness to sports and lifestyle brands, demonstrating that conversational SMS marketing transcends industry boundaries when executed with genuine customer focus.

The Performance-Based Pricing Revolution

Kyle’s background as a bootstrapped entrepreneur shines through in TxtCart’s pricing model. He understands that SMB brands can’t afford to pay hefty monthly fees for tools that might not work.

TxtCart offers performance-based pricing for its automated flows. Instead of charging a flat monthly fee regardless of results, they only get paid when they actually recover revenue for their customers.

“We eat our own dog food,” Kyle explains. “If we’re not generating revenue for our customers, we don’t deserve to get paid. This model removes all the risk for growing brands and aligns our incentives perfectly.”

This approach is revolutionary in the SMS marketing space, where most platforms charge based on message volume or subscriber count, regardless of whether those messages actually drive sales.

The AI Advantage

While competitors are still sending rule-based, templated messages, TxtCart is building what Kyle calls “fully autonomous, agentic SMS marketing.” Their AI doesn’t just follow scripts. It thinks, adapts, and learns from each conversation.

“Most platforms are still manual or rules-based,” Kyle explains. “We’re building AI that actually understands context, can handle objections, and knows when to hand off to a human.”

TxtCart’s AI can handle complex conversations about product details, shipping questions, sizing concerns, and even negotiate on pricing when appropriate. It maintains the brand’s voice throughout and escalates to humans only when necessary.

The result? Higher conversion rates, better customer experiences, and more recovered revenue with less manual work for business owners.

Looking at the Bigger Picture

Kyle’s mission goes beyond just cart abandonment recovery. He’s democratizing enterprise-grade marketing tools for the SMB market that most competitors ignore.

“The big players like Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive are chasing enterprise deals,” Kyle says. “We’re building for the thousands of growing brands that need these tools but can’t afford enterprise pricing or complexity.”

Today, TxtCart is powering SMS marketing for 3,000 Shopify brands and targeting $4 million in ARR with their lean team of just five full-time employees and 20 contractors. They’re growing 100% year-over-year while maintaining profitability.

But the real measure of success isn’t TxtCart’s revenue. It’s the $100 million in revenue they’ve generated for their customers. That’s $100 million that would have been lost to cart abandonment if these brands had stuck with traditional email recovery methods.

The Future of Cart Recovery

Kyle’s vision extends far beyond where TxtCart is today. He sees a future where cart abandonment becomes increasingly rare because AI-powered SMS marketing catches customers at exactly the right moment with exactly the right message.

“We’re not just building better cart abandonment recovery,” he says. “We’re building a system that prevents abandonment in the first place by creating genuine relationships between brands and customers.”

For the thousands of SMB brands struggling with cart abandonment, Kyle’s approach offers something that’s been missing from the ecommerce toolkit: a solution that actually works, doesn’t break the bank, and treats customers like humans instead of email addresses.

In a world where 70% of carts get abandoned, Kyle Bigley is proving that the right conversation at the right time can turn lost sales into loyal customers. And for growing SMB brands, that’s not just good business. It’s the difference between surviving and thriving in the competitive world of ecommerce.

Press Contact:

Kyle Bigley | Founder & CEO, TxtCart