The simplest cart abandonment solution on earth

TL;DR (If you want the punchline of this article) – If you use WooCommerce or EDD, sign up for Jilt to fix cart abandonment — implement it in 10 minutes.

I’ve been playing with WooCommerce a lot lately and recently started thinking a lot about cart abandonment. Mine isn’t high by quantity of abandons, but because the dollar amount is high on the tickets I sell, just one abandon is a lost bucket of revenue.

So here’s my manual cart abandonment solution:

• Step 1 – Log into wp-admin.
• Step 2 – Look at all sales.
• Step 3 – See if any sales are pending.
• Step 4 – Fire up outlook.
• Step 5 – Write and send an email to the person who didn’t finish their transaction.
• Step 6 – Wait for them to respond, then send them a link to the checkout.

That’s a lotta time spent recovering a sale. But hey, I’m trying to do big company stuff on a shoestring budget.

What do I mean by big company stuff?

Test 1: Open a new browser, head over to Amazon.com

1. Login, and take a look at any product on their site.
2. Close your browser.
3. Forget about it.
4. Magically in a day or two, you’ll get an email from Amazon with that exact product, and a link to purchase. It’s an effective method since it’s a simple reminder to complete a purchase of something you were probably going to buy in the first place.

Amazon doesn’t have a bunch of people sitting in a room writing cart abandonment emails. They’re sending them intelligently and automatically, and they’re not alone. Tons of online retailers use similar technology to send an email as soon as they get your email address – whether you’ve abandoned a checkout or are logged in.

Test 2: Act like you’re buying something on my site

It’s gonna be hard to resist hitting the purchase button (hah) but try this out.

1. Go to https://adventureswithgeeks.com/shop/stickers/adventurer-3-pack/ and head to the checkout.
2. Enter your name and email, but don’t check out.
3. Close your browser.
4. Wait for an hour, and experience the cart recovery magic.

Here’s the punchline. In about an hour you’ll receive an email following up on the order you were about to place. It will give you the option to check out. It took 10 minutes and $0 to implement.

Enter Jilt. You may have seen them around WordPress events. They work with WooCommerce and EDD, and implementation is as simple as installing a plugin.

I’m a big fan of something that recovers $$ without a ton of work on my end. I’m interested to hear what you think of the service after giving it a try. Leave something in the comments, and let me know what you think of this post.