Abandoned carts
Reminding somebody what they left in their cart, and stopping when they buy.
Somebody fills a cart on your shop and leaves without buying. An abandoned cart automation emails them a reminder showing what they left, with a link that puts the cart back so they can carry on from where they stopped.
Only people who are already subscribed contacts of this brand. Putting something in a basket is not permission to be marketed to — no more than buying is — so a cart from someone who is not on your list is counted and never emailed.
And a shopper who leaves before entering an email address cannot be reached by anybody, because nobody knows who they were. In practice that means the carts you can recover are the ones abandoned at or after checkout, or by someone logged in. No tool can do better than this; some are less clear about it.
Turning it on
- 1In WordPress, go to
Settings → Nectazoand tick Send abandoned carts to Nectazo. Tick Send orders too if it is not already on — that is what tells Nectazo the cart was bought, so the reminder stops. - 2In Nectazo, create an automation and choose the trigger A cart is abandoned. There is nothing to pick: a brand has one shop.
- 3Add a
Waitstep, then aSendstep. The wait is where you decide how long to leave them alone. - 4In the email, add the Abandoned cart block. It shows each person their own items, so there is nothing to choose in it.
When a cart counts as abandoned
After an hour of no activity. That is when the cart stops being live and the automation starts — it is not when the email goes out. The Wait step in your automation decides that, which is why there is no second timing setting to keep in step with it.
An hour is deliberately not adjustable. Shorter and you start declaring carts abandoned while somebody is still deciding, which is how a reminder arrives before the shopper has even left.
What the email can show
| Shows | |
|---|---|
| Abandoned cart block | The items, with images, quantities and the prices they saw, plus a button back to the cart. |
| {{cart_url}} | The link that rebuilds their cart, for use in your own copy or on a button. |
| {{cart_total}} | What the cart came to, formatted with your currency. |
| {{cart_item_count}} | How many items are in it. |
{{cart_total}} and {{cart_item_count}} work in the subject line as well as the body. {{cart_url}} does not belong in a subject, and the other two resolve to nothing outside a cart automation — so a subject built around one in an ordinary campaign reads as a sentence with a hole in it.
Prices are what the shopper saw when they left, and are never refreshed. If an item has gone up since, the reminder still shows the old price — correcting somebody upward in an email asking them to come back is the worst possible moment to be right.
In a campaign, or in an automation started by anything else, it renders nothing at all. There is no cart to show, and an email going out to a whole list saying “no items” would be worse than a section quietly missing.
What stops the reminder
- Buying. The order arrives carrying the cart it came from, the cart is marked recovered, and any sequence still running for it stops immediately — you do not have to configure anything for this.
- Emptying the cart, as long as no reminder has been sent yet.
- Unsubscribing, like every other automation.
A shopper who comes back and adds another item does not start a second sequence for the same basket. They are already in one.
The recovery link
The link is made by the plugin on your own site, not by Nectazo. Following it rebuilds the cart there and goes straight to checkout. It is emptied first, so following the link twice does not double everything.
The saved copy of a cart expires after 30 days. If a link is followed after that — or if your host's cache has discarded it sooner — the shopper lands on your cart page rather than on an error.
Writing the email
One reminder, sent a few hours later, does most of the work. If you add a second, leave a real gap and change what it says; two near-identical emails about the same basket is how a useful reminder becomes a complaint.
Resist discounting in the first one. A shop that reliably emails a code after every abandoned cart teaches its customers to abandon carts.
Cart sync is part of connecting a store. See Plans and limits.
Something unclear or wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it.