Abandoned Cart Pro Review: Recover Abandoned Carts On WooCommerce
69.89% – according to the Baymard Institute, that’s the percentage of people abandon who their shopping carts after adding items to their cart.
You do all the hard work of getting shoppers to your store and convincing them to add a product to their cart…but then they just leave and you don’t get any money.
Not very fun, right?
Abandoned Cart Pro is a premium plugin that aims to change that by helping you send automated emails (or text messages) to recover abandoned carts.
According to data from Barilliance, these types of cart abandonment emails convert at about 18% on average, so cart abandonment emails are definitely worth investigating for your WooCommerce store.
We’ve previously reviewed this plugin twice in the past (in 2014 and 2015). Beyond bringing new features, this most recent version also adds performance optimizations to minimize the resources that Abandoned Cart Pro uses.
Keep reading to see it in action!
Abandoned Cart Pro Features And Pricing
While there is a free version of this plugin at WordPress.org called Abandoned Cart Lite, I’ll be focusing exclusively on the paid version for this review.
The paid version starts at $119 for a single site license and ranges up to $249 for an unlimited license.
So what do you get for your money?
First off, beyond sending emails to registered users, it also includes an “add to cart popup” feature that helps you send emails to guests. So the goal here is that you can recover all carts.
You can set up unlimited abandoned cart emails, all sent at exact intervals that you determine. This is helpful because most experts actually recommend sending a series of emails, rather than just a single recovery email.
Beyond that, you can also send:
- SMS via Twilio
- Facebook Messenger messages
In your messages, you can use merge tags to include dynamic information. And the plugin also lets you include coupons, including an option to generate a unique coupon for each user.
When a customer clicks on a link in one of your emails, it recovers their entire cart – no need to re-do anything. And you can also take customers straight to the checkout process. These recovery links work across multiple devices. So a user can abandon their cart on a mobile device, then click a link in an email on their desktop and check out right away with the same items in their cart.
And once you start sending abandoned cart emails, you can view analytics to see:
- Abandoned carts
- Recovered carts, including total recovered revenue
- Basic email open/click stats
- Which products get abandoned the most
Keep reading for a hands-on look…
Configuring Basic Settings
When you first install the plugin, you’ll want to configure some basic settings.
One of the most important settings is something super basic that you might not think about:
When is a cart considered abandoned?
Most people recommend sending the first abandoned cart email quickly, so there’s a big difference between defining an abandoned cart as:
- 15 minutes without order being placed
- 45 minutes without order being placed
By default, the plugin defines abandoned carts for both logged-in users and guest users as “10 minutes of item being added to cart & order not placed”. But you can change both of these numbers in the general settings:
Other things that you can do here include:
- Automatically delete abandoned orders after a certain number of days
- Send yourself an email when a cart is successfully recovered (good for motivation, I guess!)
- Exclude logged-in users or guests from being tracked
- Choose when to start tracking carts
- Add messages for GDPR compliance
Below that, you can configure basic email details, like your from name and address:
Finally, you can also manually exclude certain users from being tracked by:
- IP address
- Email address
- Email domain name
Configuring The Add to Cart Popup
You may have noticed one problem with abandoned cart emails – if your potential shopper isn’t already a WooCommerce member, you don’t have their email to send them abandoned cart recovery emails!
So how does that work? How do you send abandoned cart emails to guests who haven’t even started the checkout process?
Abandoned Cart Pro’s optional solution is this Add to Cart popup. When activated, shoppers will get a modal prompt to enter their email after clicking the add to cart button.
Here’s an example from my test site:
Again – this feature is definitely aggressive, so you don’t have to use it. But if you do want to use it, the Add To Cart Popup Editor area lets you:
- Choose whether or not the customer has to enter their email to add the product to their cart
- Change all the text on the popup
- Configure colors
Setting Up Email Templates/Sequences
Your email templates are the actual abandoned cart emails that you’ll send. You can add as many as you want to create an entire abandoned cart recovery series.
When you install the plugin, it automatically creates a three email series with emails that send:
- 15 minutes after abandonment
- 1 hour after abandonment
- 24 hours after abandonment
Most experts seem to recommend this three email series approach, so that’s a good thing, though you might want to play around with the timing (I’ve seen some people say to wait 24 hours to send the second email).
To customize your emails, you can either edit one of the included templates or create your own (either way, it takes you to the same interface).
Choosing Segments And Timing
First, you’ll want to choose which segment of customers to send your email to. You can either send to all segments. Or, you can choose to target the template to:
- Abandoned carts with only one product
- Abandoned carts with multiple products
- Registered users
- Guest users
This is helpful because it lets you personalize your message to the user. For example, you might want to treat registered shoppers differently than anonymous shoppers.
For these emails, you can also choose to send the email to:
- Customers
- Admins
- Both
- Others (e.g. external email addresses)
And below that, you can choose the exact timing. This time starts after a cart is considered abandoned (so add the time to whatever you configured in the general settings).
If you defined an abandoned cart as “10 minutes after adding to cart” and you set your first email to send “15 minutes after cart is abandoned”, the user will get the email 25 minutes after they added the product to their cart.
Customizing The Template
After you choose the segment and timing, you can customize the actual email using the WYSIWYG TinyMCE editor with a few additions.
You get two new toolbar buttons that let you insert:
- A wealth of dynamic information. You can insert customer details, dates, product details, store details, coupon codes, etc. This makes sure that the email is personalized.
- Cart or checkout buttons. These make it easy to insert CTA buttons in your emails. These buttons take the user straight to the cart or checkout with their order fully recovered. That is – they still have all the same items in their cart.
You can also choose whether or not to use the default WooCommerce template style for your emails. Or, you can import one of the 11 pre-built templates:
One nice touch is that you’re able to preview your emails in your dashboard or send test emails:
Adding Coupon Codes For Incentivization
One common technique for recovering abandoned carts is offering special coupon codes as an incentive.
They do seem to work, though most people seem to recommend sending them as part of the second or third email in a sequence, rather than right away.
Thankfully, Abandoned Cart Pro makes it really easy to insert coupons in your emails.
You can either:
- Insert an existing coupon code that you created with the default WooCommerce functionality
- Automatically generate a unique coupon code for each email (I like this because it ensures that people don’t share the coupon code with people who haven’t abandoned their cart)
You can insert these coupon codes anywhere in your email using the same merge tags that you use to include customer and product details.
SMS And Facebook Messenger Templates
Beyond the email templates, Abandoned Cart Pro also lets you set up templates for:
- SMS notifications
- Facebook Messenger emails (I wasn’t able to test this personally)
This interface is a little more stripped down but it still lets you:
- Control timing
- Insert dynamic customer information using merge tags
- Include a coupon code (though you can’t generate a unique one over text)
If you want to use these tools, you’ll also need to set up the basic integrations via the general settings. The plugin uses Twilio to send texts, so there will be an additional charge there, as well.
Abandoned Cart And Recovery Analytics
At this point, I’ve covered the settings. But another helpful area of Abandoned Cart Pro is its analytics.
It gives you analytics for:
- Abandoned orders
- Recovered orders
- Products (see which products get abandoned the most)
- Email click/opens
And it also lets you view a log of sent emails and SMS messages.
First, you can get an overall look from the dashboard:
This dashboard is where you’ll want to spend most of your time because it gives you the most detailed information.
Abandoned Orders Tab
The Abandoned Orders tab gives you a list of all your abandoned orders, along with:
- Customer details (if available)
- Product details
- Coupon code usage
You can also click on the More info to see more:
- Customer details
- Product details
And you can even send a custom email to individual abandoned carts if desired.
Recovered Orders Tab
Once a shopper recovers an order, it moves from the Abandoned Orders tab to the Recovered Orders tab.
Beyond giving you a list of all your recovered orders, this tab also gives you a nice summary of how much you’ve been able to recover by sending your emails (if it’s more than the cost of the plugin – you made money!):
Product Report Tab
The Product Report tab lets you see which items get abandoned and recovered the most.
If you see one item get special attention, that might be a reason to revisit that product’s description and details, so I can see the benefit of this area:
Reminders Sent Tab
Finally, the Reminders Sent tab gives you a list of all the emails and SMS that you’ve sent.
It also gives you some basic details on overall email clicks and opens.
If you want to see email open/clicks for individual email templates, you can find that information in the main dashboard.
Final Thoughts On Abandoned Cart Pro
You’ll never be able to recover all abandoned shopping carts, but sending abandoned cart emails is a good way to at least get back some of them.
I found Abandoned Cart Pro to be easy to use and flexible in how it goes about things. You should be able to get set up and sending emails without any fuss – I was able to get everything working without ever needing the documentation.
All in all, it delivers on exactly what it promises. So if you want to start sending abandoned cart emails at your WooCommerce store, go check it out.
Related Articles
So many businesses need to accept bookings and appointments through their website. Since millions of such websites are based on WordPress, it follows naturally that there is a need for…
In this post, I'll show you some of my favorite third-party extension developers. While there are many sellers of WooCommerce extensions, it is very important to get your WooCommerce plugins…
WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is a WooCommerce plugin which captures the carts abandoned by Members and Guests, and recover them by sending follow up emails automatically. It also has an…
If you run an eCommerce store, abandoned shopping carts can be a major source of frustration. Customers who are seemingly so close to making a purchase, only to leave your…