WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro Review

The unfortunate reality of running an eCommerce store is that 68% of all carts are abandoned. Think about that in terms of your conversion funnel for a second – that means that 7 of every 10 people that add items from your site to their cart will leave their purchase. Not 7 of 10 people that visit your site, mind; 70% of people who are considering purchasing will leave.

That number illustrates one of the biggest leaks in the eCommerce conversion funnel: customers leaving from the cart system. However, there are ways to improve your conversions by reducing cart abandonment as well as plenty of tools available to help.

First, we should understand why customers abandon purchases. Of all abandonment reasons, 3 of the top 4¹ are related to price – usually with unexpected costs. For example, the leading cause of cart abandonment² is unexpected shipping costs. In fact, 53% of customers³ who abandon carts do so due to high delivery costs, and 26% of customers place an item in their cart just to check shipping costs.

We can help to address these concerns by setting up effective shipping methods and making them apparent, but we can also get in touch with customers to reduce these costs if they’re standing in the way of purchasing, or just to remind them to complete their purchase.

The tool I’m going to use today to help me overcome purchasing objects and to recover abandoned carts with WooCommerce is the WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro plugin from Tyche Softwares.

Table of Contents

• Overview & Costs
• Setup & Usage
• Customer Experience
• Tracking Emails & Orders
• Recovered Orders
• Support & Documentation
• Other Comments
• Conclusions

While there’s a Abandoned Cart Lite plugin available, we’ll focus on WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro with this review, as it allows you to track sent emails, coupons, products in the cart, and more.

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro is available for $119 to $249, depending on how many sites will be using the plugin (1 site, 5, or unlimited). As the plugin has the potential to directly increase revenues, I was excited to try it out and see what I could do in terms of setting up emails and recovering carts.

If you’d like to check this out in action, there’s both an admin demo and frontend demo available for you to give it a go.

Once you install the plugin into your WooCommerce shop, a new menu will be added under WooCommerce > Abandoned Cart. This is where you’ll configure all options, as well as set up and track your emails. You can also enter your license key for updates under the “Abandoned Cart License Management” menu.

The first thing to do is to go to the “Settings” tab. You can enable notifications here, and set a time after which a cart is considered “abandoned”. For example, you may not want to set this as low as one minute, as customers may be reading something on your blog or viewing product reviews elsewhere. Set a time for the abandoned cart cutoff that will most likely indicate that a customer has left. I’d recommend 1 hour, but as always, test, test, test what’s best for you.

Admin Settings

You can also determine how long to keep data on abandoned orders and set up notifications for order recovery.

So how will this work? Any time a logged-in user adds items to the cart, even if they don’t reach the checkout page, their session will be tracked for cart abandonment. Guest users will only be tracked if they get to the point of entering an email on the checkout page, as per the plugin documentation:

A record is created for logged-in users even if they do not reach the checkout page. However, for guest users, a record is created only if they reach the checkout page and enter their email address.

Once you’ve got your settings configured, you’ll want to set up your emails under the “Email Templates” tab. You can add an unlimited number of recovery emails, and send each after a certain amount of time. This will be added onto the time after the cart has been considered “abandoned” (which is configured under settings).

For example, if a cart is considered abandoned after 1 hour, and my email will be sent 1 hour after the cart is abandoned, customers will get an email 2 hours after leaving your site. This will allow you to “drip” out recovery emails, as you can set up multiple emails in time slots after the cart has been left.

Set the name of the template for your reference, as well as the from and reply to email addresses.

Creating email templates

For now, you’ll need to set up all email templates on your own. However, pre-made templates are coming in a future release of the plugin to get you started.

When you draft the content of the email, you’ll probably find the merge tags extremely helpful (as I did). These will allow you to dynamically insert content into your emails to recover WooCommerce abandoned carts. I inserted information such as the customer name and a checkout link. The checkout link will take customers directly to the checkout for their saved cart to complete and recover the purchase. This provides a smooth, easy experience to finish the order.

Email Merge Tags

As a word of advice, I’d recommend using the {{checkout.link}} merge tag as part of a “Click here” link rather than leaving is as a plain string. This will make it easier for customers to return to their carts, as they can simply click the link to complete the purchase rather than copying it and pasting it into the browser. The checkout and cart link merge tags will both work as the URL for the link.

Finally, once you’ve drafted your content, you can configure the email settings. Activate the email, set the time after the cart is abandoned to send the email, and optionally add any coupons you’d like to insert into this email for customers to use. This will correspond to the {{coupon.code}} merge tag for that email.

Email settings

As we mentioned above, shipping costs are one of the leading causes for cart abandonment, so I’ll offer a coupon that grants free shipping to my customers to incentivize them to complete the purchase. You may not want to do this as part of the first email lest customers come to expect it, but it’s a strategy to keep in mind to overcome the most significant hurdle to purchasing that customers encounter.

You can continue adding emails as needed to create a sequence of emails that are sent to customers to recover the abandoned purchase. If you send more than one abandoned cart email, it may be a good idea to include the “Unsubscribe” link from the merge tag list so that customers aren’t sent any further recovery emails if they don’t want them.

All emails

Now that my emails are set up, let’s take a look at what my customers will see. When a customer visits my store and logs into an account to begin shopping, their session is tracked. If they add items to the cart without purchasing, they’ll be sent the recovery emails, regardless of whether they’ve visited the cart or checkout pages.

If a guest user adds items to the cart, they’ll only be tracked if they enter an email on the checkout page. I would have liked to see a setting to enable or disable guest user abandoned cart recovery emails, but it’s still pretty neat that they can be tracked if an email is entered.

Any customer, once they’re part of the WooCommerce abandoned cart cycle, will receive your emails based on the schedule you’ve set. Here’s a sample of my first email, and notice that my merge tags have been replaced with the corresponding values:

Sample Email

Also note that customers are provided with a coupon and a link to complete the purchase, which makes this process as seamless as possible to bring customers back into your purchasing funnel.

One of the best parts of WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro is the ability to track sent emails and whether or not they resulted in a recovered cart. You can view all abandoned cart emails under the “Sent Emails” tab.

Sent Emails

This tab will let you track which emails resulted in abandoned versus recovered orders to get an idea of which email is more effective at converting your abandoned carts. You can also click to view the WooCommerce order for recovered orders, or the Abandoned order details for orders that haven’t been recovered.

You can view which carts are still abandoned under the “Abandoned Orders” tab. This part is really cool, as you can see if customers have created another order since abandoning the cart, as well as any coupons they tried to use before abandoning the order. This gives you insight into whether the coupon has anything to do with the customer leaving (for example, if they tried to use an invalid coupon and gave up).

Abandoned orders list

You can also view more details about abandoned orders from this screen by clicking on an Abandoned Order number. This will show you all of the items in the customer’s cart at the time they left it, as well as any details within their account (or any information entered at checkout for guest users).

An Abandoned Order

This can be used for your internal analytics, as you can note which items are abandoned most, then possibly adjust pricing or offer coupons for these products to improve conversion rates.

You can also track recovered orders from the “Recovered Orders” tab. You’ll see a list of all orders that have converted, as well as a link for more details.

Recovered carts

You’ll be able to view recovered orders up to one year old using the date range picker:

I really loved the ability to see which abandoned orders were recovered at a glance. You’ll get an overview of the total number of orders that were abandoned, as well as those that were subsequently recovered. You can also view the total cost of abandoned and recovered orders. I liked that I got a quick view of the direct impact of the plugin and WooCommerce abandoned cart emails on sales.

While the plugin was really easy to set up, there’s documentation available to help you get up and running if needed. I didn’t use this to configure the plugin, but did check it out for curiosity and liked the video quick start guide.

Each plugin purchase includes updates and support for one year, and support can be access via forums or email ticket. I didn’t need to access support for the plugin since it worked as expected, but the forum responses are active and questions are answered.

While being able to view which items are in abandoned orders is fantastic, I’d love to see some aggregated reporting on this in the future. A list of most frequently abandoned items under the WooCommerce Reports would be a fantastic tool for shop admins to analyze whether certain products are more frequently abandoned in purchases compared to others. While I’d expect the most popular products to be abandoned most frequently, it would be useful to compare top abandoned products to the top sellers list. This could also display the number of recovered orders for a product to see if some orders with a particular product are recovered more frequently or are never recovered, indicating that product may not be priced correctly.

Seeing reporting on which emails best convert into recovered carts would also be very useful, as I could then note which emails can be improved and compare them to high converters. Seeing this under the “Sent emails” list is handy, but there’s no easy way to see this information at once – something like a “Percent recovery” stat in the emails list would be superb.

I know that a few pre-made email templates are up next in terms of features, which I’m excited to see, but either built-in reporting or an add-on would make this already useful plugin a great recovery and analytics tool.

I expected the plugin to require more setup than it did, so I was pleasantly surprised when I just had to configure a handful of settings and set up emails, then I was up and running. The ability to insert merge tags and offer coupons within recovery emails is very handy, and can be used to help you overcome the most common barriers to purchasing that customers face.

The ability to track sent emails, see which templates converted, and view all recovered sales in terms of orders numbers and total value is very useful, and it’s motivating to see sales that you’d probably otherwise lose.

I would have loved to see more aggregated reporting, but the plugin functions very well as is and provides valuable insight into your conversion funnel. WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro is a great tool for increasing any shop’s conversions and recovering abandoned orders.