The Abandoned Cart Plugin for Craft Commerce

Most e-commerce websites benefit by simply reminding potential customers that their cart is still available as it increases revenue without any effort at all.

While developing a few client Craft Commerce stores I quickly realised there was no existing plugins that provided this functionality (without using a third party system at least). So I got to work and began building exactly that - A Craft plugin that not only I could use but others looking for a similar solution.

What is it?

Abandoned Cart for Craft Commerce is a plugin that provides the ability to send multiple email reminders to customers that have abandoned their carts, yay!

The plugin can be customised to suit the needs of your store. You have the ability to change when each reminder is triggered but by default it will send the first reminder 1 hour after the cart has been marked as abandoned and the final email 12 hours after that.

The defaults aren't just random, based on my research they're the most effective at converting what would be lost revenue. 2 reminders is also the recommend amount as you don't want to spam customers who might just need a bit more time.

The plugin also allows you to provide your own email templates with easy access to all customer and cart details. Creating email templates is painful and time consuming so there's also an awesome responsive template provided 🎉.

Discount codes can be included as incentives to further help convert those orders. If you provide a discount code, the template will adjust to show the discount as well as automatically apply it when the customer returns.

Conversion of abandoned carts are tracked by if the customer clicks the link in their reminder email, checks out and completes their order.

High level features

• Automatic cart restoration via link
• 2 seperate email reminders
• Timing can be adjusted for each
• Discounts/Incentives (automatically applied)
• Click tracking / Conversion
• Responsive template (ability to use your own template)

Behind the scenes

The plugin utilises Craft's built in queue system to schedule the emails. This means all you have to do to make sure emails are sent is setup a cron job that completes any jobs that might be in Craft's queue. Bonus: having these jobs sent to the queue allows you to easily handle large spikes in traffic and retry any failed attempts.

To schedule Craft's queue, setup a cron job that runs every minute, or whatever works for your store.

And to poll for abandoned carts, create another cron job that runs maybe every 15 minutes. The plugin has a built in CLI command you can easily fire. In upcoming versions you'll also be able to manually check for abandoned carts and send emails from inside the CMS.

Once you have those cron jobs up and running you're good to go 🤑