Cart Abandonment Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Notify Admin of Abandoned Carts?

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a store owner asked if it was possible to notify the WooCommerce administrator or store manager when a customer adds a product to the cart but never completes the purchase.

This question often comes up for logged-in customers, where the store can at least identify who abandoned the cart and possibly follow up with them.

While WooCommerce does not track abandoned carts out of the box, there are various plugins that help with recovery emails and promotional reminders.

However, sending an email to the store owner every time a cart is abandoned? That opens up an entirely different discussion around usefulness, frustration, and even compliance — especially in countries where privacy regulations apply.

This article explores why WooCommerce doesn’t notify admins by default, what plugin-based alternatives exist, and how to approach cart abandonment from a practical and privacy-conscious perspective.

When to Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Emails?

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, we debated the timing of the first WooCommerce cart abandonment email.

Some store owners send it one hour after the cart is abandoned, while others question whether that’s too soon and potentially annoying.

I currently use a three-email sequence: +1 hour, +24 hours, and +7 days, with a discount only in the final email. But even I’m reconsidering that first touchpoint.

Is one hour a good balance between timely follow-up and respecting user space? Or should we wait at least 24 hours to avoid appearing desperate?

The timing of your abandonment emails can drastically affect open rates, click-throughs, and ultimately recovery conversions.

What works for one store may not work for another—so this post summarizes different strategies shared by WooCommerce professionals, considers user experience, and invites you to test what fits best for your products and audience.

Let’s explore the balance between effectiveness and tact.

WooCommerce Cart Sessions and Persistent Cart Explained

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a discussion unfolded around WooCommerce cart session management—specifically how long guest carts are stored before expiration.

A core WooCommerce function confirmed the default behavior: sessions expire after 48 hours, with a soft expiration at 47 hours.

This raised further questions about whether the session expiry is extended after a cart update, and how this differs between guest and logged-in users.

Digging deeper, the conversation touched on the role of the _woocommerce_persistent_cart_ option for logged-in customers, and whether it’s still necessary given longer session durations.

Interestingly, this debate coincided with a new WooCommerce pull request suggesting the removal of persistent carts entirely in favor of simpler session management.

If you’ve ever wondered how WooCommerce stores cart data or how it behaves across different users, this post summarizes key findings and links directly to WooCommerce core code and discussions that could impact future releases.

Why WooCommerce Stores Forget Abandoned Cart Emails

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In a recent conversation on Twitter, I asked the question: Do you know any WooCommerce store owners who have never implemented an abandoned cart email? If yes, why?

The responses I received were enlightening, pointing out a variety of reasons—ranging from a lack of time and knowledge to bad plugin experiences.

While abandoned cart emails are a staple of modern e-commerce, many WooCommerce store owners still fail to set them up. In this post, I’ll explore the reasons behind this hesitation and offer solutions to overcome these barriers.

Tracking Abandoned Carts in WooCommerce to Send Reminders

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member asked how to identify products added to carts but not checked out, aiming to follow up with promotional messages to encourage users to complete their purchases.

While WooCommerce doesn’t natively track abandoned carts, several cart abandonment plugins integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce, making it easy to monitor abandoned items and re-engage users with reminders or offers.

Here’s a guide to using cart abandonment tools and choosing the best plugin for your needs.

WooCommerce: 4 Ways to Grow Your Sales With Omni-Channel Marketing

The goal of marketing automation is to help you save on effort. However, sometimes it comes at the price of poorly targeted campaigns and half-baked marketing content, which can be outright damaging to your business.

The other problem with most of WooCommerce marketing automation tools is that they have a one-off approach to marketing that aims to get as much as possible from one user interaction – during checkout, for example – without providing for loyalty or retention. This goes against the golden rule of marketing, where your biggest asset is your leads and customers and your biggest mission is to retain them.

The solution is to use a omni-channel marketing approach, where a central tool collects and enriches user behavior and history in a unified profile and then uses that profile to deliver relevant campaigns across all user touchpoints.

This ensures more harmonized marketing, a seamless experience for your users and eventually more trust and engagement with your brand. These are all the ingredients you need to increase the loyalty lifetime value of your users and customers.

WooCommerce: Recover $$$ With a Cart Abandonment Plugin

Imagine having a customer who spends ages looking through your online store, adds several products to their cart – only to abandon the order at the last step. Frustrating, right?

Abandoned carts are a significant problem for eCommerce store owners. In fact, research suggests the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%. This means that 7 in 10 customers abandon shopping carts, leading to a loss in sales and revenue for businesses.

But what if there was a way around this?

Using WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery plugins, you can engage visitors even after they’ve abandoned their carts and left your store to convert them into customers.

In this article, we’ll explore the best plugins for abandoned cart recovery. But first, let’s understand how these plugins work and why you should use them.

WooCommerce: Why Enable Sliding Cart?

Cart abandonments are a WooCommerce store owner’s worst nemesis – research suggests a whopping 69.8% of customers abandon shopping carts, causing a massive dip in sales and revenue. The same study also revealed that high and unexpected shipping charges, complicated checkout processes, and inability to see the order total are some major reasons behind cart abandonment.

But what if there were ways you could overcome these problems and increase conversions?

Well, we already covered a possible solution here, so we’ll add to that today by looking at floating cart plugins.

These tools can help your customers view their shopping cart on any page of your WooCommerce store, saving them the back and forth between the page they’re currently on and the WooCommerce cart page.

Customers can see the items they’ve added to the cart, the order total, shipping costs, and even check out – all without going to another page. This can help smoothen their experience at your store and fasten the buying process, translating into more sales and profits for you.

This article will explore some popular WooCommerce floating cart plugins you can use to leverage this feature on your store. But first, let’s understand how floating carts work and help your online store generate more sales.

WooCommerce: Quick Cart Abandonment Solutions

Automattic-acquired WooCommerce platform is one of the largest eCommerce giants – powering 29% of all online stores. It isn’t even a decade old and is already known to be a market leader – with about 5M+ active installations.

What makes WooCommerce so popular amongst eCommerce merchants is its enhanced customization ability – allowing them to tweak their store’s appearance and functionalities per specific business goals. However, eCommerce merchants’ biggest unsolved issue is the increasing cart abandonment rates.

This is where Shopify gets a competitive edge with its ShopPay checkout feature – an effective way to speed up transactions and ensure frictionless checkout for customers to reduce cart abandonment.

Today’s customers expect the checkout process to be quick and easy – which otherwise makes them abandon your website and leave the items in the carts unpurchased. The longer it takes for customers to complete the checkout – the more they’re likely to switch to convenient eCommerce stores like Amazon, which offers one-click checkout. Unfortunately, 97% of customers opt out of making purchases simply because it isn’t convenient.

We discussed the growing fickle nature of customers in the previous article – but the key takeaway is that while WooCommerce provides a convenient default checkout solution, it doesn’t offer a way that matches Amazon’s and ShopPay’s quick and one-click checkout service.

So, what’s the solution for WooCommerce merchants, and is there any way to provide an equivalent checkout experience as ShopPay or Amazon? Let’s find out.

WooCommerce: 5 Ways To Drive Sales In Your Store

The primary goal of your WooCommerce store is to sell, right?

You’ve probably got some snazzy marketing campaigns running, are working to sharpen your SEO tactics, and are using social media to bring more visitors to your store. But, while driving traffic to your site is important, there’s another key metric you need to keep in mind: your conversion rate. After all, what’s the point of bringing visitors to your store if they don’t end up buying anything?

It’s a no-brainer that more traffic is useless if it’s not bringing you more conversions. The key, then, is to focus on doing more with the shop visitors you already have.

This is where website analytics (such as those collected and stored by Google Analytics and Metorik) can be a game changer. Read on for 5 CRO hacks for WooCommerce users.

WooCommerce: 5 Ways To Increase B2B Conversions

This is a guest post by Matthew Abdalah of Rumbleship – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

Customers live in a world of digital distractions and the last place you want your customers to be distracted is during checkout.

Consumer ecommerce (B2C, business-to-consumer) has taught the B2B (business-to-business) world a lot about what a distraction-free, conversion-friendly checkout looks like: we should reference these lessons for best practices.

Due to its ubiquity, your wholesale buyers are conditioned to expect a comparable level of service to what they experience on B2C websites such as Amazon and eBay.

Tactics like 30-day terms, free shipping and bulk discounts are some of the techniques referenced in this article but we’ve compiled a few extra ones.

Here are 5 creative ways to reduce wholesale WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment, increase your sales conversion rate and grow your profits. Continue reading WooCommerce: 5 Ways To Increase B2B Conversions

WooCommerce: How To Make A Website GDPR Compliant? (12 Steps)

Ok, we all know that the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force on the 25th May 2018.

So the main question is: what changes do we need to make on our WooCommerce website to become compliant? And another important query might be: how does GDPR affect non-European WooCommerce websites?

In this article, I will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do. There are a million articles and plugins on WordPress GDPR compliance, but there is no “ultimate” blog that tells you what you should be doing.

If you don’t know what GDPR is or need a good refresher, read Wikipedia’s GDPR page or the “Introduction to GDPR Compliance for WooCommerce Stores” on the official WooCommerce blog.

Many blogs I’ve read and WordCamp events I’ve attended didn’t really give me the answers I needed. I don’t particularly care about GDPR itself, I just want to know what I need to do on my WooCommerce website.

So, let’s see what changes you’re required to make.

Please note: I’m not a lawyer and cannot guarantee this article is going to make you 100% compliant – make sure to assess your GDPR compliance with a qualified consultant.

WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

If your WooCommerce store already generates a few orders per month, then it’s probably the right time to step up and start analyzing your ecommerce data.

Despite the “WooCommerce > Reports” tab within the WordPress dashboard can give you sales figures, stock takes and customer lists – we all know that’s a very basic, limited functionality. It gives you CSV export but no automation. There are no filters and no segments. It’s accurate but still not enough.

Data plays a vital role on your WooCommerce website. If you can get access to a wider range of figures, reports, screens, calculations, exports, filters, integrations, then it’s very likely you can understand how to increase your profits.

Data can help you identify problems (hello, cart abandonment – biggest responsible for low conversion rates), can help you select popular products for your cross-sell and up-sell strategy, can give you a hint on how to improve the user experience and have them check out faster – as well as giving you a hand analyzing patterns, performances and customer behavior.

In this (very long) post, we’ll take a look at ways to gather ecommerce data beyond the default “Reports” section, generate email digests, print advanced reports, filter and segment orders and customers, and much more. I will be referring to the two biggest tracking software for WooCommerce: Google Analytics and Metorik. Continue reading WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

Tag: Cart Abandonment