Tracking and recovering abandoned carts

Abandoned carts occur when a customer adds items to a cart, but leaves your store without completing an order. With abandoned cart recovery emails, you can remind buyers about unfinished orders. Each recovery email contains a list of products the shopper left in the cart and a button to complete an order.

You can enable automated recovery emails sending, send emails manually, or place the order from abandoned carts yourself. Automated cart recovery emails are sent 2 hours after a customer has abandoned the cart, so the reminder is timely and relevant. You can also add a discount coupon to the email to encourage a person to finish their purchase.

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Understanding abandoned carts

Carts are considered abandoned when:

• A customer has added at least one item to the cart.
• A customer specifies their email address at the first step of checkout.
• A customer closes the checkout page without completing the order.

On the My Sales → Abandoned Carts page, you will find a list of abandoned carts, a total sum of all redeemed sales, and details on each abandoned cart.

In each incomplete order, you will find a date the order was abandoned, a customer’s name and contact details, and a preferred shipping option if a customer chose one. You will also see one of the following abandoned cart statuses:

• Reminder email scheduled — recovery email will be sent automatically within 2 hours. You can send it manually if you want.
• Reminder email sent — recovery email has been sent either manually or automatically.
• Recovered — a customer successfully purchased an order by clicking a link in the email.

After you enable automated emails sending, shoppers will get a reminder about unfinished orders in your store. Once a customer receives and opens the recovery email, they will see a short message from your store, the photo, name and price of an abandoned item, and a link to complete the order. You can customize the email template to fit your brand. If you send emails manually, you can edit the message prior to mailing.

When a customer clicks on the link in the email and makes the purchase, the order will automatically receive the Recovered status on the Abandoned Carts page and will also appear on the Orders page. The order will be considered recovered only if a customer clicks the recovery link and completes the checkout. The abandoned cart won’t be marked as recovered if a customer completes an order by returning to the website without using the checkout recovery link from the email.

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Enabling automated cart recovery emails

Automated cart recovery emails will save your time since you don’t have to manually track and recover each abandoned order.

After the automated recovery emails are enabled for the first time, your store will send a reminder email to all customers who abandoned their carts during the last 2 weeks.

To enable automated recovery emails:

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Adding discount coupons to automated cart recovery emails

To encourage customers to complete the order, you can add a discount coupon to the abandoned cart recovery emails. To redeem the coupon, a customer will need to copy the code from the email and enter it into the coupon field at the checkout.

To add the discount coupon code to automated marketing emails:

1. From your store admin, go to Marketing → Automated Emails.
2. Near the Discount coupon in abandoned cart recovery email, click Manage.
3. In the Marketing tools section, click Add Discount Coupon.
4. Choose an existing active coupon from the dropdown, or click Manage Coupons to create a new one. Your coupon should not be limited by the single use; otherwise, only one customer will be able to get a discount.
5. Click Save.

When a buyer clicks the Complete Order button from an email, they will be redirected to the checkout, where they can enter the code. To access the coupon field, your customers should click the Redeem your coupon link at checkout.

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Removing discount coupons from automated cart recovery emails

If you no longer want to provide customers with discounts in automated marketing emails, you can remove a coupon code. Your customers will still receive the abandoned cart recovery emails but without a discount code.

To remove a discount coupon from an automated marketing email:

1. From your store admin, go to Marketing → Automated Emails.
2. Near Discount coupon in abandoned cart recovery email, turn off the toggle.

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Customizing automated abandoned cart recovery email template

The automated abandoned cart recovery email template is set up of ready-made content to fit any business. The email has the “You left items in your cart” subject and shows each customer a link to your store, the short message, an abandoned product photo, name and price, a link to the cart, and contact and legal information in the footer.

You can customize the default template by editing company info, adding your logo to emails, changing the message or email subject, and more. Changes to automated email templates can be made on the Notifications page of your store admin.

Let’s say you want to change the email subject, rewrite the text message, and add a logo to your abandoned cart recovery emails.

To make an adjustment to a template:

1. From your store admin, go to Settings → Notifications.
2. Scroll down to the Logo section and click Upload Logo.
3. Upload your store logo. In our example, it’s a pumpkin head. The changes will be saved automatically.
4. Scroll up to the Customer marketing emails, and select Abandoned cart recovery.
5. In the Email subject, write your own heading. For example, Would you like to complete your purchase?
6. In the Default message for customers, enter your message.
7. Click Save.

That’s it. Now your customer will receive abandoned cart recovery emails with your store logo, your custom text, and the email subject will be displayed as Would you like to complete your purchase? The rest of the email will stay the same, with a photo of abandoned items and link to complete checkout.

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Sending cart recovery emails manually

Sending a recovery email manually helps you build more personalized communication with a customer. For instance, you can address a person by name or offer them a discount coupon for completing a purchase.

To send a cart recovery email manually:

1. From your store admin, go to My Sales → Abandoned Carts.
2. Find the order that you want to recover, and click Send Email.
3. (optional) Edit the subject and the message exactly the way you want. For more deep customization, you can change company info that appears in the email footer or add your logo to emails.
4. (optional) You can add a discount coupon to an email to encourage a customer to place an order. To do so, create a coupon on the Discounts coupons page and copy the coupon code to the email. A customer will have to enter the code to the coupon field at the checkout. To access the coupon field, your customers should click the Redeem your coupon link at checkout.

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Placing an order from an abandoned cart manually

You can manually convert an abandoned cart to standard order. For example, if a customer abandoned a cart because they didn’t find the right payment method to pay for an order. In that case, a client can contact you and pay you directly with a payment method that is not set up in your store.

When you manually place the order, it is moved from the Abandoned carts list to the regular order list on the My Sales → Orders page. You can choose the payment status for the order and whether or not to send a customer the email notification about the order. The customer won’t be charged, so you have to contact the customer via email or phone they provided to arrange payment.

To place the order from abandoned carts:

1. From your store admin, go to My Sales → Abandoned Carts.
2. Select the order you would like to place and click Update → Place Order.
3. In the popup window, you can choose the payment status and payment method from the dropdown. You can also choose whether to send or not to send the order confirmation email to a customer.
4. You will also see how the stock quantity will change if you place the order. In case it’s the last item in stock, you will see the Out of stock notice. In case the number of items in order is more than the actual number of items in stock, you will see the Oversale notice.

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Turning off automatic abandoned cart recovery emails

If you want to temporarily stop sending abandoned cart emails, you can turn off the active toggle on the Notifications page in your online store.

To turn off abandoned cart recovery emails:

You can always re-enable sending abandoned recovery emails.