Manual, Guided, or AI Mode: Which Cart Recovery Setting Fits Your Store?

Most abandoned cart tools give you one choice: set up a popup with an offer, or turn it off. Resparq gives you three. That is not because three is a nicer number than one. It is because the question "should AI run my cart recovery" has a different right answer for different stores, and often a different answer for the same store six months apart.

This post explains the three modes in plain terms: what you control in each, what the AI controls, what you give up, and how to pick. If you only read one section, read the last one.

The One Decision Underneath All Three

When a shopper with a full cart moves to leave, four things have to be decided in about a second:

• Who. Should this shopper see anything at all? Some are leaving for good. Some will be back tomorrow regardless.
• When. The moment the mouse heads for the tab bar, after a stretch of idle time, or right away on a phone where there is no mouse to watch.
• How. The headline, the wording, the layout, the colors, the sense of urgency.
• What. The offer itself. Ten percent off, five dollars off, free shipping, a reminder with no discount, or nothing.

The three modes are just three different splits of those four decisions between you and the AI. Manual mode gives you all four. Guided mode gives the AI the first three and keeps the fourth for you. AI mode gives the AI all four, inside limits you set.

Manual Mode: You Set Everything

Manual mode is the classic popup. You write the headline and the body copy. You choose the discount, or no discount. You choose the trigger: leaving the page, sitting idle, or showing immediately. You choose the template. Every eligible shopper gets the same thing, and nothing changes unless you change it.

What you get: total predictability. You know exactly what every shopper will see before they see it. There is no model to trust, no learning period, and no surprises in your discount report. Manual is on every plan, including the free one.

What you give up: two things, and the second is bigger than most people expect. First, there is no targeting. The regular customer who was going to check out anyway gets the same 15% as the first-timer who clicked an ad and needed a push. Our guide to discount code strategy walks through what that leakage costs. Second, there is no control group. Because every shopper who trips the trigger sees the offer, nobody is held back to compare against, so you can never know how many of those "recovered" orders would have happened anyway. Manual mode can tell you how many people used the code. It cannot tell you what the code earned.

Who it fits: stores with very low traffic, where there is not enough data for any model to learn from yet. Stores running a short, specific promotion that has to look exactly one way. And anyone who wants to see the product work before handing anything to software.

Guided Mode: You Set the Offer, AI Does the Rest

Guided mode starts from a simple promise: the discount is yours, the delivery is the AI's. You pin one offer, percentage or fixed amount, and that is what every shopper who gets a modal receives. Never a bigger one. The AI never goes above the number, and goes below it only if you switch that on.

Everything around the number is handed over. The AI looks at a set of things about each visit and decides whether this shopper should see a modal at all. It decides when: on exit, after idle time, or immediately on mobile. It picks the wording and the layout from a set of variants it keeps testing, and drops the ones that lose. How that detection works is covered elsewhere; the point here is that the parts of the job a human cannot do by hand are the parts the AI takes.

Three details matter in practice:

• The pin is honored exactly. AI mode has a margin guard that trims offers for shoppers who look likely to buy anyway. Guided switches that off. You said 15%, so 15% is what gets served, every time. Your margin exposure on a single order is exactly the number you chose. If you want a little flexibility, a "let the AI go lower" setting turns your pin into a ceiling instead of a fixed value, so the AI may offer less but never more.
• Zero is a valid pin. Set the offer to 0 and Guided runs reminder-only: the AI still targets, times, and tests the message, it just never attaches a discount. Useful for brands that do not discount at all but still want to recover carts.
• Your code stacks. Resparq only fires when a shopper looks likely to abandon, which means whatever offer they already had was not enough. So Resparq's code is built to sit on top of your existing discounts wherever Shopify's combination rules allow. It is the extra nudge, not a replacement for your welcome code.

What you get: AI targeting and testing on an offer you already trust, with a predictable per-order cost. And because Guided holds back about 10% of eligible shoppers as a control group, your dashboard reports the difference the AI actually made, not just how many codes were used. That control group is the whole reason the number on your dashboard means something; here is why it matters.

What you give up: per-shopper offer sizing. Every shopper who gets a modal gets the full pin, including the ones who would have converted on a reminder. That is the margin AI mode exists to recover.

Who it fits: most stores, most of the time. Brands with firm rules about what discount can ever appear. Stores with thin margins that need a hard per-order ceiling. And anyone who wants to see the AI prove itself on who and when before letting it near how much. Guided mode is available on Pro and up.

AI Mode: The AI Sizes the Offer Too

AI mode is the full version. Everything Guided does, plus the one decision Guided keeps for you: how big the offer should be for this particular shopper.

The reasoning is the one from our piece on what AI actually does for a store: the best discount is the smallest one that still closes the sale, and the right size is different for different people. A shopper who has been back three times, has a high-value cart, and is already on the checkout page probably needs a reminder, not 15% off. A first-time visitor from a cold ad with a small cart may need the full offer. A fixed rule cannot tell them apart. AI mode can, and it runs a permanent experiment on whether a discount is even needed for each type of shopper, dropping it where a plain reminder converts just as well.

You are not handing over a blank check. Three controls bound what the AI can do:

• Aggression dial, 0 to 10. Sets how deep any offer is allowed to go. Zero means reminders only. Low settings keep offers in the 5 to 10% range, high settings allow 20 to 30%. Most stores start in the middle and adjust after a couple of weeks of data.
• Margin guard. No single offer can push an order's post-discount gross margin below 20%. Shoppers who look very likely to buy regardless get a reminder at zero discount. This is always on in AI mode and is the main thing that separates it from "just give everyone the max."
• Budget cap. A weekly limit on total discount spend. When it is reached, the AI stops attaching discounts and keeps showing reminders until the week rolls over.

What you get: the most profit per modal shown, because discount dollars go only where they change the outcome. The system keeps testing new variants and is better in month six than in week one without you editing anything. On Enterprise it goes one step further and finds the winning design and offer for each type of visitor separately.

What you give up: knowing in advance exactly what any one shopper will see. Two shoppers abandoning similar carts on the same afternoon may get different offers. For most stores that is the point. For a brand with a strict "we never discount more than X, and everyone gets the same X" policy, it is a dealbreaker, and Guided is the right home.

Who it fits: stores with enough traffic for the model to learn from, healthy enough margins that the guard has room to work, and a willingness to judge the result on profit rather than on any single modal. AI mode is on Pro and up.

Side by Side

• Who sees a modal: Manual mode, everyone who trips your trigger. Guided mode, the AI decides. AI mode, the AI decides.
• When it appears: Manual mode, the trigger you chose. Guided mode, AI timing. AI mode, AI timing.
• Wording and layout: Manual mode, your copy and template. Guided mode, AI tested variants. AI mode, AI tested variants.
• Offer size: Manual mode, fixed by you. Guided mode, fixed by you, honored exactly. AI mode, sized per shopper inside your dial, margin guard, and budget cap.
• Control group and measured lift: Manual mode, none. Guided mode, yes. AI mode, yes.
• Plans: Manual mode, all plans including free. Guided mode and AI mode, Pro and up.

How to Pick

Start in Guided mode unless you have a specific reason not to. It is the setting that lets you keep the one decision most owners feel strongly about, the discount, while handing over the three decisions no human can make well at scale. You get a control group from day one, so the first number you read on the dashboard is a real one.

Stay in Manual mode if your traffic is too thin for a model to learn from yet, or if you are running a promotion that has to look exactly one way for a short time. Come back when volume picks up.

Move to AI mode when two things are true: the Guided mode numbers have convinced you the targeting works, and you are ready to let the AI protect margin by giving less where less will do. The switch is one button, your learning history carries over, and the AI starts warm instead of from zero. Plenty of brand-protective stores never make that move and live in Guided permanently. That is a fine answer too.

The modes are not a ladder you are obliged to climb. They are three honest answers to how much you want to hand over, and you can change your answer whenever the numbers tell you to. See our plans.