Abandoned carts in CartBounty

According to Baymard, on average almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. It’s an enormous potential revenue, however big part of it is unavoidable due to simple browsing or “window shopping”. With that being said, there is still a big part just waiting to be recovered and CartBounty is here to help.

CartBounty helps to save abandoned carts, increase recoverable abandoned cart ratio using efficiency tools and send effective abandoned cart reminders.

This article will cover the following topics:

1. How CartBounty saves abandoned carts

One of the core CartBounty functions is to save online shopping carts. As soon as a product is added to the cart, it is visible to the store administrator in CartBounty abandoned carts. The cart remains anonymous until the user provides contact information from one of the following sources:

As soon as CartBounty has user’s contact information, the anonymous cart is turned into a recoverable cart. After the user places an order, the abandoned cart is immediately removed from the list of abandoned carts.

If Unfinished order recovery is enabled, abandoned cart will remain in the list of carts and will be subject to recovery if the order has a specific status (e.g. On hold, Pending payment etc.).

Unfinished order recovery
Unfinished order recovery

Is it abandoned already?

A shopping cart is only considered to be abandoned after a period of 60 minutes from the last user’s activity with the shopping cart. If you see a “shopping” status in the CartBounty abandoned cart status column, it means the user is still shopping.

Example of an anonymous cart
Example of an anonymous cart

Any notifications or reminders will be sent out only after the cart is abandoned and the “shopping” status is gone.

Example. Let’s say you have setup your first abandoned cart recovery email or text message to be sent out after 5 minutes. The user will receive it after around 65 minutes = 60 minutes + 5 minutes.

Please see this if you would like to change the period of 60 minutes to a different time interval.

2. Abandoned cart types

Anonymous

Carts that cannot be identified are classified as anonymous since the visitor has not provided any contact information. In this scenario, the user has added one or multiple items to the cart but has not provided any contact information that can later be used to recover it.

Perhaps you are curious as to why someone would want to save them? Here are a couple of reasons:

  • To keep track of live shopping cart activity and get a better understanding of what’s happening in your store
  • To identify the most popular products that are being added to carts
  • To gather information about the potential revenue from abandoned carts

CartBounty settings allow you to disable anonymous carts or allow them only from specific countries.

Recoverable

Recoverable cart is a shopping cart that can be identified – the user has provided contact information. Since recoverable carts poses contact information (email address or phone), these carts are eligible for abandoned cart recovery.

Recovered

Recovered cart is an abandoned cart that has been recovered with the help of CartBounty. If a user arrives from an abandoned cart recovery email or text message and places an order with status “Processing” or “Completed” – the cart is marked as “recovered”.

Paused

It is possible to pause individual abandoned carts. Paused abandoned carts will be excluded from abandoned cart recovery, meaning no reminder emails, SMS text messages or push notifications will be sent to its owner. You can also resume abandoned cart and it will be included in recovery.

To pause individual abandoned cart – hover over it and use the “Pause” link. To Pause multiple carts at once – use Bulk actions.

Example of a newly recovered abandoned cart
Example of a newly recovered abandoned cart

3. How to prevent bots from leaving abandoned carts

If you have noticed unusual amounts of multiple new anonymous carts being left almost at the same time, from one country and consisting of a single product, it might be that they are left by bots who are visiting your store. Bots can be divided into two groups – good ones and bad ones.

Good bots

One of the most common types of a good bot would be a web crawler. It is a bot that is sent from search engines like Google or Yahoo to index your site. Online store owners generally welcome these bots, because it keeps their contents and products updated in the search engine results and hopefully attracts new customers.

These bots respect the directions they are given and obey the rules set in the robots.txt file which is where information about resources that should not be visited are provided.

To prevent good bots from creating abandoned carts, please add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*add-to-cart=*
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/

Harmful bots

These bots are visiting your store for malicious purposes. Their actions range from mildly harmful to potentially critical. Bad bots are scanning your store for weaknesses, security holes, ways to take over your store, steal data etc. In doing so, they are also increasing stress on your server thus slowing down your site.

Harmful bots might also be responsible for leaving anonymous carts on your site. While this is not dangerous, it can be frustrating and annoying. Here are three solutions that will help prevent bad bots from leaving abandoned carts:

  1. The quick solution is to simply disable anonymous carts from being saved by CartBounty. You can do this in the CartBounty Settings tab. As easy as this solution is, it only deals with consequences and does not stop these harmful bots from visiting your store, continuously searching for new vulnerabilities, and slowing down your shop
  2. A better solution would be to install a WordPress plugin that helps to prevent bots from visiting your store. You could try out a couple of different plugins, but this might be a good starting point: Blackhole for Bad Bots. This way you will block harmful bots from wandering around your store and keep anonymous carts enabled to see what your customers are shopping for
  3. If you have a developer, they can help you check your server access logs to identify any bot entries. Then, you can use the .htaccess file to block these bots and prevent them from visiting your website. Check out this article for more information on blocking bad bots.

In addition, you can select if guests from specific countries should be able to leave anonymous carts thus making sure that bots coming from countries you do not sell to are not able to leave anonymous carts.

Allow anonymous carts only from specific countries
Allow anonymous carts only from specific countries

Using Google reCAPTCHA to fight bots

If you are receiving unusual amounts of recoverable abandoned carts that have phones or emails that look like they are filled by bots, you might want to enable Google reCAPTCHA to protect your store from saving such abandoned carts.

CartBounty integrates Google reCAPTCHA v3 which is a free and invisible tool that will protect your store from bots leaving recoverable abandoned carts. It uses a sophisticated algorithm that assigns a score between 0.0 and 1.0 to each user that lands on your store. A score of 1.0 means the user most probably is a real person.

CartBounty will not save any abandoned cart if the user’s score is below 0.2. Please take a look at this example to learn how to adjust the default sensitivity using a filter.

Please note that enabling Google reCAPTCHA will not protect your store against anonymous carts. It only protects against bots leaving recoverable abandoned carts (ones that add products to the cart and enter email or phone number).

4. Automate abandoned cart recovery

Another core functionality of CartBounty is automated abandoned cart recovery. Once the cart is abandoned, an automated reminder or a series of multiple reminders over a period of time can be sent out to the user to remind about items in the shopping cart.

You would not want to be spending your time manually sending email, SMS reminders or push notifications to hundreds of abandoned cart users weekly. CartBounty allows to setup and send automated abandoned cart recovery messages using the following options:

What’s next

Now that you have gotten acquainted with how CartBounty handles abandoned carts, you might be interested in the following topics:

Last updated 2 months ago

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