Abandoned Cart Recovery

Publisher: User Data Function | Consumer: Activator, Eventhouse

Business context

An ecommerce company loses significant revenue when customers add products to their cart but do not complete checkout. Most recovery strategies rely on scheduled batch jobs that fire hours after the abandonment occurs, long after the customer's intent has faded.

A User Data Function receives a real-time webhook from the storefront whenever a cart is abandoned. It retrieves the customer profile, evaluates eligibility for a recovery offer, and publishes a Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned Business Event. Activator sends a personalized recovery email immediately. Eventhouse stores every event for conversion analytics.

The problem without Business Events: The User Data Function would need to call the email service, the CRM follow-up API, and the analytics store directly. Each integration is a hard dependency. Changing the recovery channel — from email to push notification, for example — requires modifying the function code.

The solution with Business Events: The User Data Function publishes one event. Activator delivers the personalized offer independently. The CRM follow-up is a separate Activator rule. A new recovery channel is a new subscription, not a code change.

Architecture

flowchart LR
    subgraph External
        EC[Ecommerce\nStorefront]
    end

    subgraph Fabric
        UDF[User Data Function\nCart abandonment handler]
        FA[(Fabric Data + AI\nCustomer profile, cart history,\noffer rules)]
        BE([Business Event\n'Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned'])
    end

    subgraph Consumers
        ACT1{Activator\nOffer rule}
        ACT2{Activator\nCRM rule}
        EH[(Eventhouse\nConversion analytics)]
    end

    EC -->|Cart webhook| UDF
    FA -.->|context| UDF
    UDF -->|Publish event| BE
    BE --> ACT1
    BE --> ACT2
    BE --> EH
    ACT1 --> EMAIL[Personalized\nrecovery email]
    ACT2 --> CRM[CRM\nfollow-up task]

Step 1: Create the Business Event

Before publishing any event, define it in Real-Time Hub. Enable Eventhouse integration during this step.

1. Go to Real-Time Hub → Business Events → Create.
2. Create or select an Event Schema Set. Use EcommerceCart as the schema set name. You will need this name when connecting the Event Schema Set to the User Data Function through the connection manager.
3. Name the event Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned.

4. In the schema editor, paste the following JSON:

   {
     'type': 'record',
     'name': 'Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned',
     'fields': [
       {
         'name': 'customer_id',
         'type': 'string',
         'doc': "Unique identifier of the customer"
       },
       {
         'name': 'customer_email',
         'type': 'string',
         'doc': "Customer email address for recovery communication"
       },
       {
         'name': 'cart_id',
         'type': 'string',
         'doc': "Unique identifier of the abandoned cart"
       },
       {
         'name': 'cart_value',
         'type': 'float',
         'doc': "Total value of items in the cart at time of abandonment"
       },
       {
         'name': 'item_count',
         'type': 'int',
         'doc': "Number of distinct items in the cart"
       },
       {
         'name': 'last_activity_at',
         'type': 'string',
         'doc': "ISO 8601 timestamp of the last customer cart interaction"
       }
     ]
   }
   

5. Confirm that Analyze in Eventhouse is enabled. Create a new Eventhouse or select an existing one in your workspace. This creates a dedicated KQL table named Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned automatically.

6. Select Create.

Step 2: Publisher - User Data Function

The User Data Function receives a webhook from the ecommerce storefront and publishes the Business Event.

Create the User Data Function

1. In your Fabric workspace, select + New item and create a User Data Function named PublishCartAbandonedEvent.
2. Inside the UDF item, select New function.

Connect to the schema set

1. In the Home ribbon, select Manage connections.
2. Select + Add connection, search for EcommerceCart, and select Connect.
3. Note the alias (EcommerceCart by default). Close the pane.

Function code

import fabric.functions as fn
import logging

udf = fn.UserDataFunctions()

@udf.connection(argName='businessEventsClient', alias='EcommerceCart')
@udf.function()
def publish_cart_abandoned_event(
    businessEventsClient: fn.FabricBusinessEventsClient,
    customer_id: str,
    customer_email: str,
    cart_id: str,
    cart_value: float,
    item_count: int,
    last_activity_at: str
) -> str:
    logging.info("publish_cart_abandoned_event invoked.")

    event_data = {
        'customer_id': customer_id,
        'customer_email': customer_email,
        'cart_id': cart_id,
        'cart_value': cart_value,
        'item_count': item_count,
        'last_activity_at': last_activity_at,
    }

    businessEventsClient.PublishEvent(
        type='Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned',
        event_data=event_data,
        data_version='v1'
    )

    return "Event 'Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned' published successfully"

For full details on publishing Business Events from User Data Functions, see the User Data Function publisher documentation.

Step 3: Consumers

Consumer 1 - Activator: Personalized recovery offer

1. In Real-Time Hub, locate Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned under your schema set.
2. Select Set alert and name the rule Cart Recovery - Offer.
3. In the Monitor section, set Source to Business events and connect to Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned.
4. Set Condition to On each event. Add an optional filter on cart_value > 30 to focus recovery spend on higher-value carts.
5. In the Action section, configure the email or Power Automate flow that sends the personalized recovery offer. Add customer_email, cart_id, and cart_value as context fields.
6. Select Save.

Consumer 2 - Activator: CRM follow-up task

1. In Real-Time Hub, locate Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned.
2. Select Set alert and name the rule Cart Recovery - CRM.
3. Set Condition to On each event.
4. In the Action section, configure the Power Automate flow that creates a CRM follow-up task. Add customer_id and cart_id as context fields.
5. Select Save.

Consumer 3 - Eventhouse: Conversion analytics

Eventhouse integration was enabled during event creation. Every published event is ingested into the Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned KQL table automatically.

Open your Eventhouse KQL database and run the following queries to explore recovery patterns.

Peak abandonment windows — last 7 days:

['Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned']
| where ingestion_time() > ago(7d)
| extend HourOfDay = hourofday(ingestion_time())
| summarize Abandonments = count() by HourOfDay
| order by Abandonments desc

High-value carts abandoned in the last 24 hours:

['Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned']
| where ingestion_time() > ago(24h)
| where cart_value > 100
| project customer_id, cart_id, cart_value, item_count, last_activity_at
| order by cart_value desc

Daily abandonment volume trend:

['Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned']
| where ingestion_time() > ago(30d)
| summarize Abandonments = count() by bin(ingestion_time(), 1d)
| order by ingestion_time() asc

Step 4: End-to-end test

Invoke publish_cart_abandoned_event with the following test values:

Parameter	Value
customer_id	cust-5521
customer_email	test@example.com
cart_id	cart-9987
cart_value	145.50
item_count	3
last_activity_at	2024-06-22T09:00:00Z

Then confirm the event arrived in Eventhouse:

['Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned']
| where cart_id == "cart-9987"
| order by ingestion_time() desc
| take 1

If the row is present and the Activator offer rule fires, your end-to-end setup is working.

What happens next

With the event in place, recovery channels can be added, changed, or removed without touching the User Data Function.

flowchart LR
    BE([Business Event\n'Ecommerce.Cart.Abandoned']) --> ACT[Activator]
    BE --> EH[(Eventhouse)]
    ACT --> EMAIL[Recovery email]
    ACT --> PA[Power Automate\nCRM follow-up]
    ACT --> PUSH[Push notification]
    EH --> KQL[Conversion analytics]
    EH --> RTD[Real-Time Dashboard\nabandonment trends]

Extension	What it enables
Recovery email	Immediate personalized offer triggered by Activator
CRM follow-up	Sales task created via Power Automate for high-value carts
Push notification	Additional recovery channel — new Activator rule, no code change
Conversion analytics	Query which recovery timing and offer types drive the highest conversion
Real-Time Dashboard	Live view of abandonment volume and high-value cart pipeline

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