Noob question: how hard is it to build automated "abandoned cart" emails?

I know the bare bones and work with a developer. trying to connect my mailchimp with our site, which is built on rails.
is this a tough task ? how long should it take to develop?
any info helps TONS

Shouldn't be too bad. You'd want to figure out what it means to abandon the cart. Is that a cart that was last created 1 hour ago that wasn't checked out?

Then you'd want a cron job to look for those carts every X minutes or so, and then send the email. You'll probably want to mark those carts as "abandonment email sent" or something so you know to filter them out next time.

The cron job running every X minutes should always find ones created one hour ago and incomplete, so that the emails get sent out regularly.