WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro Guide + 6 Alternatives (2024)

WooCommerce abandoned cartIf you run an ecommerce store, it’s very likely you have seen dozens or even hundreds of lost purchases due to a WooCommerce abandoned cart. This is a common occurrence. People change their minds all the time. It’s natural and there isn’t much you can do about it.

Or is there?

It may be tempting to think you cannot do anything about abandoned carts but ecommerce may have answers.

What if we were to tell you that you could recover a significant number of lost purchases simply by doing what we recommend in this article?

One case study revealed that you can recover 29% of abandoned carts. We are going to show you how. 

 

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WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Summary

  Overall

 4.5/5

  Ease of use

 4.5/5

  Reliability

 4.5/5

  Support and Documentation

 4.5/5

  Value

 4/5

Price

$149/year

Free Version

No

What We Liked

 Very powerful Abandoned carts plugin for WordPress/WooCommerce.

 

 Flexible means you can handle various ways to recover lost sales.

 

 Reputable, highly-rated, WooCommerce vendor.

 

 Facebook Messenger Integrated.

 

 SMS Notifications via Twilo.

What We Didn't Like

 

 Website

Visit Website to Download Now

Send Recovery Emails for Free using WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Lite

You probably already know the importance of abandoned cart recovery and the ways to recover them, so we’re going to review our preferred plugin for WordPress that helps you do just that. This is Abandoned Cart plugin by Tyche Software.

There are two versions of the plugin:

In this section, we’re going to discover how to use the free version.

Abandoned Cart Lite is an excellent plugin that’ll help you recover lost purchases. To begin, install and activate Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce from your WordPress dashboard.

Abandoned Cart for WooCommerce Lite

Once activated, you can find it under WooCommerce > Abandoned Carts.

menu item in WordPress 

Upon clicking the menu, you will be taken to the dashboard, which looks like this:

View order

Here, you can view the list of abandoned orders. You’ll find information about them such as the email address of the customer, the customer name, the total price of the order, the date they stopped making the purchase and the current status.

You can now decide to view the order or delete it. Clicking “View order” will enable you to view more information such as the address and the contents which were added.

Creating Email Templates

Under the Email Templates tab, you will find your notification email templates. In the screenshot below, we have three templates and they were set to be sent at set intervals which follows the tricks we discussed earlier.

Creating email templates

If you wish to create a new template, click the Add New Template button. 

The “Template Name” is private and is used for organizing purposes. You can name it anything you want. In the earlier screenshot, you can see that our Template Names were “Initial, Secondary”, and “Final” which allows us to easily determine which email is which.

The “Subject” is your email’s subject line. Here is where you’d place an eye-catching subject like “10% off your pending order” to entice your customer to open the email.

<p ">Next is the email body section.

Email body

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can use built-in variables to help you craft your notification email.

Below the Email Body editor, you’ll find additional important settings. 

Use WooCommerce template style setting

The first option, “Use WooCommerce Template Style” will make use of WooCommerce’s design in your email formatting. Unchecking it may result in your emails being sent in plain HTML.

The next one, “Email Template Header Text” is what appears at the header of your emails, as shown below. This email sample uses WooCommerce style.

Reminder

 

The next option, “Send this email” allows you to choose when the email should be sent. You can choose to send the email either 1, 2 or 3 days or 1, 2, or 3 hours after the cart was abandoned.

General Settings

The settings page will allow you to adjust various options regarding the behavior of the plugin:

General settings 

The “Cart abandoned cut-off time” defines how long the plugin will wait before marking an order as abandoned. If a customer adds items to their shopping cart and has not proceeded to checkout after the number of minutes you defined here, then this will be marked as abandoned.

The next option is fairly straightforward which allows you to define how long such items should remain in the database before deleting them.

The next option, “Email admin On Order Recovery” is another straightforward one, which notifies you or another admin whenever a sale was recovered. This could be useful if you want to send a personal message to your recovered customers, etc.

If you enable the “Start tracking from Cart Page” option, then once a customer adds an item to their cart, the plugin will automatically start tracking the cart even if the customer doesn’t visit the checkout page.

The problem here is that you won’t be able to capture the customer’s email, so there will be no way for you to send them an abandoned cart email reminder. This can be solved by using the Pro version of the plugin, which we will tackle later on.

The remaining options from this settings page are for privacy purposes, which should be fairly straightforward.

Email Sending Settings

This page helps you configure sending settings, the options are fairly straightforward. The plugin does a good job of explaining their uses. It can be accessed by clicking the “Email sending settings” besides the “General settings” as shown below:

Email sending settings

Recovered Orders

In this tab, you can view a report of your recovered orders within a selected date range. You’ll be able to check how many orders you recovered as well as the total amount you recovered from them along with other details.

Recovered orders

Product Reports

In this tab, you can view what products were abandoned, how many times this happened and how many times they were recovered. 

Product reports

FAQs and Support

The final tab contains frequently asked questions about the plugin as well as Tyche Softwares contact details.

And that’s it how to send notification emails for free thanks to the Abandoned Cart Lite plugin from Tyche Softwares. It’s a powerful free tool that will help you recover potentially lost sales with ease - and for free! It also includes some valuable tools that can help you in tracking abandoned carts and products.

While this functionality is great, there are much better ways to boost your recovery rates. Limited functions such as the inability to capture the customer’s email as soon as possible to make sure that you can send them an abandoned cart email are solved in the Pro version of the plugin, but there’s so much more than that! 

Let’s check it out next.

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro

While the Lite version of the plugin offers basic recovery tools, WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro offers a complete set of features that will allow you to try to recover as many abandoned carts as possible.

The pro version includes all the features of the free version, plus many more. Some of the free features were extended to allow for more customization. 

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro

The Pro version has undergone a lot of changes over the past year. Tyche Software added new features and improvements such as Facebook and Twilio integration allowing you to send abandoned cart messages to your customer’s Facebook accounts or their mobile phone.

We’re going to see these features as we go on a tour of the plugin.

Keep in mind that we’re not going to explain in detail all of the features of the plugin. We are just going to check them out and compare them to the free version where applicable.

Some of the features of the Pro version requires advanced setup and the new Email Body Template editor has a lot more to offer. Fortunately, there’s exhaustive documentation available on Tyche Software’s website to help you.

Visit Tyche to See a Live Demo Now

Let’s start the tour!

Dashboard

The dashboard alone instantly shows the difference between the free and the pro version, with the latter greeting you with a pretty looking graph about your store’s cart abandonment statistics.

Abandon cart report

In the screenshot above, you can see the number of abandoned orders and the collected email from the “Add To Cart Popup” setting, also presented via a nice circle graph.

Further down the main dashboard, you’ll see more information that displays your email and campaign stats. 

Emails sent stats

This feature allows you to measure the effectiveness of your recovery campaigns to help you make informed decisions on what to change or improve for better results.

Abandoned Orders

The Abandoned Orders tab looks similar to the free version. The pro version, however, shows you more details and you have more options at your disposal, with more columns in the list.

Orders detailed

You can see that the “Status of Cart” column is now also color-coded. Furthermore, you can now instantly send a custom email to the customer, which could be useful if they have tons of products in their cart - you wouldn’t want to miss that!

Templates

Instead of “Email templates”, the pro version now calls this just “Templates” tab. The reason is that aside from abandoned recovery emails, you can now send SMS notifications and from Facebook Messenger as well.

Notification templates

Adding New Templates

Let’s see what’s new in the “Add New Templates” section:

Send email to segments of users

We now have more control over the email templates. We can fine-tune the number of minutes before sending the email after cart abandonment. In the free version, we can only choose from either 1-3 days or hours, now we have more granular options, giving us more customization options.

The “Send to selected Segment(s)” option allows you to choose whether you’ll want to send the email to a guest user, a registered user or a cart with a single product. This offers fine control over which email to send to whom.

Up next is the “Send the Abandoned cart emails to” which allows you to choose if you want to send the email to customers, to admins, or both or even to custom email addresses.

The Email Body section remains largely the same, but now you have more options to choose from especially in the variables and there’s also the new buttons variables.

Here is a full list of items you can actually use as variables for your template:1. Customer First name: {{customer.firstname}}

2. Customer Last name: {{customer.lastname}}
3. Customer Full name: {{customer.fullname}}
4. Customer email address: {{customer.email}}
5. Customer Phone number: {{customer.phone}}
6. Date when cart was abandoned: {{cart.abandoned_date}}
7. Coupon Code: {{coupon.code}}
8. Shop Name: {{shop.name}}
9. Shop URL: {{shop.url}}
10. Store Address: {{store.address}}
11. Admin Phone number: {{admin.phone}}
12. Product Information/Cart Content:
13. Product Image: {{item.image}}
14. Product Name: {{item.name}}
15. Product Price: {{item.price}}
16. Product Quantity: {{item.quantity}}
17. Product Subtotal: {{item.subtotal}}
18. Cart Total: {{cart.total}}
19. Checkout Link: {{checkout.link}}
20. Cart Link: {{cart.link}}
21. Unsubscribe link: {{cart.unsubscribe}} 
 
With the above variables, you can create an email notification with as much detail as you need, of course, it's your choice which to use.

 

Additional buttons for email templates

The bottom part remains largely the same, except for the additional ability to add coupon codes.

More email settings including coupon codes

SMS Notifications

One of the notable features of the Pro version is the ability to send SMS notifications to your customers. This feature requires you to have a Twilio account. 

SMS notifications settings

You can make use of tags to further customize your text messages, as you can see from above.

Facebook Messenger Templates

Aside from emails and SMS, you also have the option to send abandoned cart reminders to your customers through Facebook. It requires some additional setup to work. Thankfully, there’s an excellent guide on Tyche Software’s website to help you with that.

Facebook messenger templates

Settings

Just like in the free version, the settings tab allows you to configure the plugin’s settings and behaviour. To reflect the additional features of the Pro version, the settings tab contains more options to configure as well as additional sub-pages.

One of the most prominent new settings that you can configure on this page is the “Add to Cart Popup Editor” which will prompt users to enter their email address before they can add a product in the cart.

add to cart popup editor

In addition to that, further below the page, you can find additional advanced settings for WP-cron as well as e-mail and IP exclusion.

Sending settings

Add to Cart Pop Up Editor

This powerful feature exclusive in the Pro version will allow you to capture the email address of anyone adding items to their cart. The default configuration of the pop-up menu will reveal a prompt that asks users to enter their email address once they click “Add to cart” anywhere on your site.

The users will just have to enter their email address in the box and the process is done. It doesn’t interrupt the buying process by a lot which should help with uptake.

You can also configure it to allow users to continue without entering their email address. In this case, you may want to put a strategy to ensure that they’ll give their email address to you.

Below you can see the default settings of the Cart Popup menu.

Popup editor

Facebook Messenger Settings

Up next is the page where you can configure Facebook messenger reminder settings. Follow the documentation on Tyche Software’s website to find out how you can utilize this feature.

Facebook messenger settings

SMS

The SMS settings page is fairly straightforward. Remember that you need a Twilio account for this to work. Here’s what the SMS settings page looks like:

Twilio sms settings

Recovered Orders (Pro)

You can see your recovered carts in this tab. Remains similar to the free version.

Recovered order report

Reminders Sent

This is another feature not present in the free version. In this tab, you can view the list of emails and SMS messages sent, the time they were opened and whether the links were clicked or not.

Reminders sent

Product Reports (Pro)

With Product Reports you can see what items were abandoned, the number of times they were abandoned as well as the number of times they were recovered.

Product report

Alright! We’ve covered about 90% of what the plugin offers and that should give you an idea about the difference between the free and the pro version as well as the notable features the latter has to offer.

The next question is, is it affordable?

Pricing 

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro comes with three pricing plans. The first licence is for a single store, which costs $149/year. Then the next option is for up to five stores which costs $299/year and the final option is for unlimited stores which cost $349/year. This is for a 1-year licence. Renewals come at a discount.

We think this is pretty good. If you think about it, recovering just one or two orders per month is already a good return on the price of the purchase.

If you have a lot of abandoned carts, then the pro version will certainly be worth the investment.

Click here for the lowest price in March 2024

Testimonials

There are many satisfied users of Abandoned Cart Pro. On their website, people say that the plugin works great and that their customer support is excellent. And if you’re wondering if they’re genuine, they’ve got links to some of the user testimonials pointing to social media accounts.

Even the free version has a rating of 4.5 stars in the WordPress repository. 

5 star review

The plugin also got a shoutout from Chris Lema: 

Chris lema testimonial

Colin Newcomer and ThemeIsle have also written a great article, using this plugin as the centerpiece.

themeisle

Really and truly, this is the best WooCommerce plugin to recover any abandoned orders.

Summary of Abandoned Cart Pro

We believe that Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce by Tyche Software is hands down the best plugin you can use to recover any order abandonment. Using this product and using a combination of tips we mention believe, you can easily recover a significant portion of lost sales through abandoned carts.

Start Recovering Lost Sales Today 

Alternatives to WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro

Even though we have concentrated on Abandoned Cart Pro so far in this guide, it isn’t the only abandoned cart plugin. There are others worth checking out.

They include:

  1. Retainful
  2. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
  3. Yith Woocommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
  4. Recart – The New GhostMonitor
  5. Cart Reports
  6. Cartback

Let’s take a quick look at each.

1. Retainful

Retainful

Retainful is a solid abandoned cart plugin. There is a free and a premium version that works with both WooCommerce and Shopify. The plugin enables you to track abandoned carts, automatically send reminder emails, send further emails with coupons and incentives if they convert and provide analytics for everything it does.

There is also a neat drag and drop email template creator that makes short work of building emails ready for use. You can include coupons or discounts to encourage conversion and once they become a customer, you can send future emails with more discounts or coupons to encourage loyalty.

The plugin is easy to use, tracks everything that’s going on and works well.

2. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is a WooCommerce plugin that tracks abandoned carts and enables you to send emails like those we have mentioned above. It can track registered and guest users and provides a simple way to track and email them for follow up.

You can create a series of email templates to cover those three main emails we recommend you send. You can include hyperlinks, coupon codes, discounts and other incentives too.

WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is straightforward to use, works seamlessly with WooCommerce and can track guests as long as they leave an email address. It’s exactly what you need.

Learn More about Recover Abandoned Cart

3. Yith Woocommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

Yith Woocommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

Yith Woocommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is another WooCommerce plugin worth checking out. It’s a first-class abandoned cart plugin with all the features you need to maximize sales. Like these other plugins, it sets a timer from the moment a customer leaves a cart incomplete and can automatically send an email.

Emails are tracked and controlled from a simple dashboard where you can quickly see how many abandoned carts you have. You can also see how many emails have been sent, how many recovered carts and even how much revenue reclaiming those orders has generated.

You can include images, links and coupons in your emails and create almost unlimited templates to cover every eventuality.

Check out this YITH Product

4. Recart – The New GhostMonitor

Recart

Recart is an abandoned cart plugin for WooCommerce and then some.

Not only can it track and send automated emails for abandoned carts but can also help with further outreach too. Like Retainful, Recart covers the cart recovery process well. It includes email templates, automatic sending and the inclusion of incentives.>

Recart also includes further marketing emails, customer package tracking emails and SMS versions of all of these. It’s both a cart recovery plugin and outreach plugin that includes email and SMS.

The plugin has an intuitive dashboard that covers all elements of cart recovery plus all the analytics and extras tools you need to help run an outreach program.

Try Recart Now

5. Cart Reports

Cart Reports

Cart Reports is a little different. Rather than providing the automation for emailing lost customers, this plugin provides detailed metrics allowing you to identify them. It provides real-time reports on everything that’s happening in your store, including abandoned carts.

The reports include cart activity, sales, abandonments, orders and more. You can then dig into a report to see details on customers, locations, numbers, order cost, lost order costs and everything you can think of.

Then you can dig one step further to view order details and email the customer direct. You will need emails set up but few other plugins give as much detail on what’s going on in your store than this one!

Find out and fix the products that are being abandoned most

6. Cartback

CartBack

CartBack does abandoned carts in a slightly different way.

Rather than emailing the customer, it uses Facebook Messenger to contact them. As long as the customer has checked the Facebook Message box when they add a product to a cart, you can use the social network to contact them directly whether they complete checkout or not.

As long as they are logged into Facebook on their device, messages will be sent on a schedule to suit. You can include the three message types we suggest. There are default messages already created and you have the opportunity to customize them before they are sent. All messages are sent from your store’s Facebook page.

As this plugin uses an opt-in box, it complies with both GDPR and Facebook’s own rules on outreach messaging. You still have to have the app reviewed by Facebook when you add it to your page though.

Check out Cartback on Code Canyon

WooCommerce abandoned carts can be recovered

You can still make a sale even after a customer has left your site after adding items to their cart without placing the order. All they need is a little prompting and maybe a bit of an incentive to make it easy for the potential customer to make their decision.

Recovering abandoned carts is a key part of eCommerce and can be the difference between making a profit and not. It is something every store owner needs to get to grips with. The sooner the better!

Lost sales statistics

 

Making abandoned carts pay

Do some maths in your head. Calculate all your abandoned purchases over the past month. Now add a third of that amount to that month’s revenue. That’s what you could achieve with very little additional work!

By simply using a process that prompts a user to come back to the store and finalize a purchase, you could potentially see a significant increase in bottom-line revenue. With zero manual intervention required once set up.

But how do you recover abandoned carts?

The simple answer is to remind customers about their pending purchases and that you’ve kept their items in your cart.

This can be easily achieved by sending an email notification about their last session on your site, urging them to continue shopping or to finish their order. When this doesn’t work, you may need to offer incentives to reel them back in.

With that in mind, in this article, we’re going to see a powerful abandoned cart emailing solution for WooCommerce - Abandoned Cart Pro. We will also look at six other plugin options that do a similar job.

But before we get into that, let’s talk a little about abandoned carts first.

Empty trolley in car park

 

What is An Abandoned Cart?

No, we're not talking about physical trolleys which have not been returned to their "parking" ;-) 

 When someone adds something to an online shopping cart and then leaves the site without making a purchase, that’s an abandoned cart.

Abandoned carts are very common. Cart abandonment rate has been high since 2006, averaging by 66.7% from the past twelve years (2006-2017), as shown in the graph below (source: Statista). 

In the first quarter of 2018, however, shopping cart abandonment rate reached a whopping record high of 75.6% according to new data from Statista. This means that online stores, in theory, could have made four times more sales if only they were able to prevent or recover all those abandoned carts.

Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

There are many reasons why people do not complete a purchase. Knowing and understanding these reasons will allow you to make informed decisions on what to do to recover abandoned carts and reduce them as much as possible.

Here are some of the most popular reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart and what you can do about each of them.

Abandonment rate statistics

Here are some of the most popular reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart and what you can do about each of them.

1. An unexpected increase in total price after adding shipping costs and taxes

You’ve probably experienced this yourself. You go to an online store, pick some items you like and then when you’re about to check out, you see that the total price is very different from what you’ve expected. You see that the shipping costs and taxes added a significant increase to the total price.

What will you do? You’ll probably abandon the shopping and look for other online stores with cheaper shipping or more transparent pricing.

The solution? Be transparent and fully disclose all costs from the start. Perhaps add the tax to the listing price and be upfront about shipping costs.

Better yet, bundle the shipping cost into the cost items and then offer “free shipping” upon checkout. Believe it or not, that works very well. Free is a powerful word!

Bundling the shipping cost on the product’s price and offering free shipping yields more sales than separating the product price and shipping costs.

Statistic high shipping costs

2. Customers are concerned about security and trustworthiness

People see this in the news a lot. Online hacking, hijacking, and insecure websites are very prevalent. These are seen as significant risks for e-commerce and this can seriously impact the user experience.

When your customers feel insecure about your site, they will most likely abandon their shopping cart. It doesn’t matter how cheap or great your offer is!

credit card detailS

The solution? There are quite a few:

  • Make sure you add an SSL certificate to your site
  • Provide your full name (and other owners’ and associates’ names if applicable) as well as you and your partners’ full address(es), contact details
  • Have clear terms and condition and a transparent money-back guarantee policy
  • Allow customers to pay through PayPal so they don’t have to give you their credit card details
  • Make sure that every element of your site appears trustworthy

Customers will feel more at ease if they know who owns and operates the site and that you are a legitimate company. But sometimes this isn’t enough.

You can further boost your trust rating by using social proof.

This can be achieved by using genuine user testimonials, establishing a strong social media presence and by paying close attention to your website’s design and layout. Sometimes that even means updating your design to enable feedback and reviews.

Yes, your site’s appearance plays a major role, believe it or not.

Think about it. Where would you buy products costing tens, hundreds, or even thousands? From a site that's not responsive, has broken or hard to use navigation, is full of broken links, and is badly designed? Or from a site that utilizes a clean, responsive modern design and works flawlessly?

Just as an example, why do people shop at Amazon?

Partly because they have good prices, but most importantly because they know the site, it has a great reputation for being trustworthy. If you shop from Amazon, you believe you are safe.

You need to present the same professional appearance as Amazon or other leading retailers.

3. The need to create accounts

Customers want convenience. Forcing customers to create an account to checkout increases the likelihood of cart abandonment. Once again, according to Statista, 21% of customers hate long processes, so they leave the site without purchasing. 

Register account after purchase

The solution? Allow them to checkout without having to create an account. This is called guest checkout and works incredibly well.

Simply asking customers for an email or phone number for order follow-ups should be enough. Or use a payment gateway like PayPal that completes the transaction without the need for an account.

Of course, you can still try to get customers to create an account as well. Just explain how it could help them track their orders easier, access special offers or another inducement.

But never force them to open an account.

4. Customers suddenly have to attend to something

This happens all the time. Imagine, you’re browsing for new shoes in an online shop, then an unexpected visitor came in, a phone call, your kid needed you, or another urgent matter requires your immediate attention.

Perhaps you’re waiting for a friend at a meeting place and while waiting, you decided to browse for something. You then add a product on the cart but suddenly your friend is here, so you don’t complete your purchase.

Life happens, it interrupts our shopping, we forget and that purchase is abandoned in the process.

The solution?

Send a reminder email or abandoned cart email and follow-up to the customer to remind them about their pending cart contents. We’ll discuss this in more detail a little later.

5. Customers are just browsing or researching

Online shoppers do a lot of research first before purchasing an item, particularly when they are making an important or expensive purchase.

They check the best brands or products based on their needs, budget, preferences and then they find the cheapest or most trustworthy place to purchase the product.

Customer journey diagram

They may go to your online store, add the items they wanted on a cart to check the final price. They then don’t check out and go and check competitor sites.

They’re checking out where they can get the best bang for their buck. While the fact that they left your site is not great, it’s still a good sign that your company was a candidate.

More importantly, the customer is in researching mode, which is about to switch to buying mode. They are not yet ready to purchase, but they certainly will.

The solution? Send a reminder email, or an abandoned cart email to follow up. You can then offer coupons or discounts or reduced or free shipping to entice them into purchasing the contents of their cart.

Now that you know the most popular reasons why customers abandon their cart, it’s time to know why you should recover an abandoned cart.

If you’re thinking that their decision can’t be helped, you are mistaken. You can influence the decision. Sometimes customers just need a gentle push to make it happen.

Let’s explore that topic in the next section.

Why Recover Abandoned Checkouts?

One of the obvious reasons why you need to recover abandoned carts is increased sales. By recovering them, you will be able to boost your sales, revenue and bottom-line profitability.

Remember that trying to reach a new customer is much more expensive than getting one that already showed interest.

Abandoned cart emails are also inexpensive to implement (especially in WordPress and WooCommerce) compared to other forms of advertisement and promotion.

In particular, if you are running a plugin such as WooCommerce Subscriptions or are taking bookings using such plugins as we have mentioned here, each lost customer is a significant loss to your business.

Have a look at the following infographic from SaleCycle:>

Salecycle infographic

You will be able to determine the best courses of action to increase your sales by analyzing how your customers engage with your recovery emails. Did your cart recovery emails get the most response when you included a product discount?

Then, maybe your pricing is a little steep for the average customer. Or perhaps you recovered the most carts when you offered free shipping, which means that your shipping costs are a bit high.

Overall, putting effort into analyzing and creating your abandoned cart email campaigns can help make you a better online store owner.

Let’s now see how to recover some of those lost sales.

Best Way to Recover Carts

One of the best ways to recover carts is by sending an abandoned cart email to the customer. Other ways are by sending browser notifications, Facebook message notification or text messages.

We’re going to tackle the email recovery method in this section.

The standard way of doing it is by sending a wave of three emails:

  • The first one is sent within an hour after cart abandonment.
  • The second one is within 24 hours of cart abandonment.
  • The final one is sent within 3-5 days of cart abandonment.

Let’s take brief a look at each phase.

1. The First Email

The first email is crucial. It should be sent within an hour after cart abandonment. Any longer would drastically decrease the conversion rate.

The first e-mail should simply contain a friendly reminder about the customer’s pending order. The message’s tone should be customer service oriented.

Ask them if they had difficulty placing an order and put resources such as links and FAQs about ordering as well as details on how to reach your customer support to assist them in completing their purchase, if applicable.

Trouble checking out?

Most of the people that you’ll be able to capture back in the first email are those who are ready to purchase your products but are suddenly interrupted by something.

Remind them to complete their purchase within a short amount of time so that they don’t forget about it, potentially leading them to a competitor if they try to shop again later.

The notification should be a summary of their shopping cart contents including the quantity and price as well as a link to take them back to their shopping cart containing the exact products they left.

2. The Second Email

If they didn’t reclaim their cart on the first email, there’s a good chance they didn’t just have to leave your site to attend to something. They were probably researching or perhaps dissatisfied with your pricing or shipping costs.

Free Shipping Offer 

That’s what the second email will take care of.

This email should be sent within 24 hours of cart abandonment. In this second mail, you will try to persuade your customer by offering incentives and by creating a sense of urgency or scarcity.

If the product is popular, you can try using a subject line like “Hurry, items in your cart will be sold out soon!”. You can do shipping discounts if you have flat shipping rates, but make sure you make the discount limited to 24 hours or so, to ramp up the scarcity.

3. The Third and Final E-mail

This is your last chance and final attempt to recover your lost customer.

This is typically where discounts and coupons are used. Discounts are the ultimate weapon in an abandoned checkout recovery attempt. Other ways include offering discounts on their next purchase or by providing bonus loyalty points where applicable.

The discount trick is usually used for first-time buyers or first purchases. This is to prevent repeat offenders (people who abandon their carts to get discounts).

Offer discount

You can use something in the lines of “We’ll give you a 15% discount on your first purchase valid for 3 days! Don't miss out!”.

Don’t forget to let the customer know that this will be the last time you’ll be emailing them about their abandoned carts.

4. An extra step

On every email, try putting a link to a survey asking your customers why they didn’t complete their purchase.

This will allow you to understand what made them change their mind at the last minute. This way, you will be able to find out what made them back out. Whatever it was, you’ll be able to adjust the experience based on the feedback of your clients.

Frequently Asked Questions about WooCommerce Abandoned Cart

Does WooCommerce have abandoned cart?

Yes, there are a number of WooCommerce Abandoned Cart plugins. You can use the WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Lite to get started with handling abandoned carts. If you need additional function you can switch to a Pro version of one of the plugins listed in this article.

What percentage of users abandon their shopping cart?

About one-third of users will abandon their shopping cart for various reasons. If the reasons are related to price or shipping price, you can recover the cart with a simple offer. Others are just researching or might have gotten distracted and a simple reminder can prompt them to come back to the shopping cart.

How do I view abandoned carts in WooCommerce?

You can go to WooCommerce, then navigate to Carts to see the various statuses of the carts in your online shop. This might vary slightly with the different plugins available.

 

Conclusion

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro offers tons of features to help you recover your abandoned carts. It comes with ease of use, flexible pricing and extensive documentation.

Overall, it’s worth the purchase if you’re seeing lots of abandoned checkouts on your ecommerce store. The investment you’ll have to pay can easily be recovered by a couple of recovered carts.

That’s especially true if you follow the simple guide above. There is no reason why you couldn’t recover a noteworthy number of abandoned checkouts!

That said, WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro isn’t the only abandoned cart plugin you can use. The others we feature are viable competitors and while Abandoned Cart Pro delivers everything you need, it isn’t your only option.

To be honest, if you go with any of the options in this list, you should begin seeing an increase in profits and reduction in lost sales!

About the Author
David Attard
David has been working in or around the online and digital industry for the last 21 years. He has vast experience in the software and web design industries using WordPress, Joomla and niches surrounding them. He has worked with software development agencies, international software companies, local marketing agencies and now is Head of Marketing Operations at Aphex Media - an SEO agency. As a digital consultant, his focus is on helping businesses get a competitive advantage using a combination of their website and digital platforms available today. His blend of technology expertise combined with a strong business acumen brings a competitive edge to his writings.

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