Email archives collect what arrives on its own. The flows that actually make money only fire if someone behaves like a customer — so we send real shoppers into your competitors' stores, abandon the carts, and write down exactly what comes back and when.
One vertical at a time. We tell you our coverage before you pay, and we tell you when we lose it.
Illustrative of the deliverable format, using representative timings. We publish real ladders only for brands we have actually run, and every figure we ship carries the date and the trigger timestamp it came from.
Mystery shopping has existed in retail for fifty years. It has never been done properly for lifecycle email, because it costs time and money and does not scale to a hundred thousand brands. That is exactly why it is worth doing.
| What our shoppers do | What it unlocks | Anyone else have it? |
|---|---|---|
| Join the list | Welcome / onboarding series | yes — commodity |
| Browse products, leave | Browse abandonment | no |
| Add to cart, walk away | Cart ladder — offers, timing, escalation | no |
| Start checkout, drop out | Checkout abandonment | no |
| Actually buy | Post-purchase, cross-sell, review requests | no |
| Buy, then go quiet 60–90 days | Winback and lapsed-customer sequences | no |
Shoppers that open and click so they don't get suppressed, in the geographies you care about, so the sequences keep arriving month after month.
Carts abandoned on known timestamps, repeated over time. That's what turns a pile of emails into a sequence with measured delays.
Flows get edited. We trigger again and diff: a fourth cart email added, a discount moved from 10% to 15%, a sequence quietly switched off.
Per competitor, per flow. Dated, timestamped, and sourced to the trigger that produced it.
The category is full of tools that overclaim. Ours does one thing, and here is everything it deliberately doesn't do:
Cart Ladder costs money to produce — real identities, real carts, real purchases. We'd rather charge honestly for it than pretend it's software.
Launch pricing while coverage is being built, and it will rise as the panel deepens. We are not going to invent a discount deadline to make you hurry.
Name two or three competitors of one client. We'll come back within a business day with whether they're already in coverage, what we can see today, and what the lead time is if they're new. No account, no card.
Your mail client should have opened with this ready to send. If nothing happened — which is what most webmail users see — copy the message below and send it to hello@cartladder.com yourself. There is no database behind this page yet, so nothing was stored and nothing was sent on your behalf.
Competitive purchasing and mystery shopping are long-established and legitimate practices. We subscribe addresses we own to public marketing lists, browse public storefronts, and abandon carts — none of which is a wrong. Where we purchase, we use real, legitimately issued payment cards belonging to a real registered company. We do not fabricate payment credentials and we do not impersonate real people. Some sites' terms restrict automated account creation; where that applies we work within them or we tell you the brand is out of coverage.
They collect email that arrives on its own and then classify it. That works well for newsletters and broadcast campaigns, and they cover far more brands than we ever will. It cannot reach a cart ladder, a browse abandonment sequence or a winback, because those only exist if somebody performs the behaviour that triggers them. We do the behaviour. That is the entire difference, and it is the reason we are more expensive and narrower.
Several platforms categorise emails by the journey they appear to belong to, across hundreds of thousands of brands. Inferring a category from an email that happened to arrive is not the same as triggering a sequence at a known timestamp and measuring the gaps. If a vendor can tell you the exact delay between cart email two and three for a named brand, and the date they measured it, they did the fieldwork. Ask them.
Fewer than you'd like, on purpose. We are building one vertical at a time and we publish the current list before you buy. If a brand you need isn't covered we'll quote a lead time — usually three to four weeks for no-purchase flows, longer where a purchase or a dormancy period is required.
It happens, and we'll say so plainly rather than interpolate. A coverage gap is reported as a coverage gap with the date it started. Making up the missing weeks would destroy the only thing we're selling.
Yes — it's designed for it. Everything ships white-labelled and export-ready. Agencies bill competitive research inside retainers that already run several thousand a month; that's the intended use, not a loophole.