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Quick start

The whole loop on one checkout, in a little over an hour: you abandon a checkout, the pass notices it, you get the reminder, the link puts your cart back, and you buy. Do it with an email address you can read, because the email is real.

You need Abandoned Cart Recovery installed and your user group granted its permission. See requirements and install.

1. Switch it on and choose how it may email

Open Extensions → Extensions → Modules → Abandoned Cart Recovery. It opens on the Settings tab, with a warning that nothing is being sent.

The position choice on the Settings tab. An amber box says nothing is being sent because no position has been chosen. Below it, Reminder only is selected and marked recommended, and Marketing sequence, marked needs consent, has an unticked acknowledgement and a newsletter-only switch.

  1. Turn Status on.
  2. Leave Reminder only selected. It is the position that needs nothing from you, and the one to learn the extension on.
  3. Press Save. Until you do, the choice is not stored and nothing is sent.

If your store has never sent an email, choose a mail engine under System → Settings → Mail first. The banner above the tabs will say so if it is missing.

2. Abandon a checkout

In a private browser window, go to your storefront, put a product in the cart and go through the checkout as a guest, with your own email address, as far as the last step, Confirm Order. Close the window there without confirming.

That unfinished order is what the extension looks for. Stopping earlier, at the address step for instance, leaves nothing it can see.

3. Wait for the first email

The first email goes an hour after you left (First email after, on the Settings tab), at the first pass after that. OpenCart's scheduler runs a pass every hour, when your host calls its cron.php. To run one yourself instead:

cd /path/to/store
php extension/abandoned_carts/abandoned_carts.php

When the pass has run, the Episodes tab lists your checkout under Emailed, with a green dot under Emails.

The Episodes tab. An Address contains box and a Filter button sit above nine filter pills with counts, with Emailed selected. One row shows the shopper's address, 2 items at $63.00 left behind, the time it was abandoned, a green dot marked clicked, the outcome Emailed, and Suppress and Order buttons.

The email names your store, lists what you left with today's prices, and says it is the only one you will get about it.

The reminder email. It greets the shopper by first name, says they started an order and did not finish it, and offers an Open my cart button. Two items are listed with their prices, then a line giving the items' total and saying shipping and tax are worked out at checkout, then the sentence This is the only email we will send you about it. The footer gives the reason for the email, a Don't send me cart reminders link, and the store's postal address.

Press Open my cart. The products go back in the cart and you land on the checkout. If something could not go back, you land on the cart page instead, with a line naming it.

The cart page after following the link. A green notice says the items from the email are back in the cart, and that one product could not be put back because the store no longer sells it as chosen. The cart holds the one product that could be restored.

The row on the Episodes tab now says clicked beside its dot.

5. Buy, and watch it come back

Place the order and pay with a method that puts it at one of your Processing or Complete statuses (System → Settings → Option). At the next pass, the abandonment moves to Recovered, and the funnel at the top of the Episodes tab counts it.

The funnel headed In the last 30 days: checkouts abandoned, how many were emailed and why the rest were not, how many opened their cart link, how many placed an order within 7 days of their last email, and the value of those orders, followed by a sentence saying the figure counts orders that followed an email, not orders the email caused.

That is the whole loop. Before you go live, read the two ways it may email and decide whether Reminder only is where you want to stay.