Originally posted on: Unisport

Introduction

There are a lot of abandoned cart entries out there from marketing’s perspective, but on this one I’ll also give you an insight on how to develop this kind of feature on your e-commerce.

An abandoned cart is generated when a customer in an e-commerce store adds products to the cart but doesn’t end up buying anything.
In order to help, even persuade, some customers to finally end up buying in this case, there is a widely spread marketing technique: The abandoned cart email.

Let’s put an example:

Alice goes into Unisport, adds a couple of bleeding-edge hi-tech football boots to the cart and starts the checkout process.
At that moment, she receives an important call and leaves the process unfinished.
Luckily enough, after a while she receives an email containing a link to the site letting her know she left some items behind.
Then, she can go to the site again and finally buy her so much desired pair of football boots.

Domain

First of all let’s take a look at the nature of the feature. Based on marketing studies, there are several factors that affect directly emails’ success. Let’s describe the main ones very briefly:

• Abandoned cart definition: This is the amount of time that needs to pass from the last cart modification to consider a cart or basket abandoned.

• Time to reach out customer: This is the amount of time after which you want to reach out the customer since last cart modification.

• Minimum price of cart: Value total of the items in the cart.

Even though this is not meant to be a marketing lecture, there are some general rules that can work more or less fine out of the box for everyone, and these are:

• Try to never reach customers more than a couple of days after the cart was abandoned because they might have forgotten about it all along or they are just not interested anymore.

• Try to reach customers at the same hour of last cart edition because odds are that person has a daily routine and is browsing or available for shopping on the same time frame every day.

• Avoid reaching out customers for a low total cart value to optimize profitability.

Another crucial aspect to take into account is which checks are needed to be performed before sending out an email for a customer.
Depending on country an explicit consent or subscription to the service may be needed, it might be it’s fine with a general permission throughout the site, some special condition like having previous purchase history or even the case where no permission or consent is needed at all.

TECH

Some time ago, at Unisport we realized we didn’t have in place a mechanism to call out for those customers who left an abandoned cart behind so we decided to build our own system to manage the process.

Having sites for more than nine countries, modularity is a must. People around the world have different routines, tempos, interests, laws, shopping behaviors etc… So the “one-size-fits-all” approach, can only be taken advantage of to some extent.

So let’s dive right away into the specifics: In our case, the logic is ran as a task in a worker server periodically i.e. as a cronjob.
When thinking about the scheduling of the task, the bigger the frequency, the more times the task runs per day but the less abandoned carts it has to process on each run and the more accurate time to reach customer is.

As seen in the picture above, there’s another factor that comes into play: How long back in time are abandoned carts fetched. This is defined by the period of time the task covers. Let’s see an example:
Let’s say the task is configured to run every two hours and look up for abandoned carts up to two days ago. In this case, for each run there’s a time window of 48 hours updated every two, or what is the same, on every task run the time window rolls forward two hours. So for each task run, the first two hours of the previous run are excluded and two new hours go in instead.

The task is structured in three distinguished main blocks:

• Retrieving all abandoned carts

• Filtering out the ones not fulfilling all required conditions

• Sending out emails to customers hoping to engage them enough as to get them to finish the process they started.

STEP 1 - Retrieving all abandoned carts

In the first step, all the main factors of the feature are used to fetch from the database all the carts that have been $abandoned (see description above), were created $time to reach out customer ago and cost at least $minimum price of cart.

STEP 2 - Filtering out the ones not fulfilling all required conditions

Here, all the checks come into place filtering out all the carts that don’t match current rules. For each site a batch of carts is evaluated.
Information regarding the checks to perform is loaded dynamically from the configuration.

The results of the execution of each batch are stored as well as the configuration used for that specific run. For every filter applied, there’s a value stored showing the result of applying that filter.
Aditionally, other bits of information like if that batch had a customer voucher assigned to it and its value are collected.

This step is more of a fine-grained tuning of the selection in the previous step, yet essential to be able to adapt to different markets, countries or laws.

STEP 3 - Sending out emails to customers

Finally, once the recipients list is set in stone it’s still needed to push the emails out and let them fly away to their future and welcoming owners.
In this stage all the content of the emails is generated based on the site an the content of the cart of that customer.
It’s utterly important to nail this step; amount of emails sent is huge and you don’t want to send by mistake a wrong email or even more than one per cart. Customer won’t enjoy being flooded!

Monitoring

One of the most important topics to have in mind when developing IT projects is monitoring.
Telling whether a condition is too strict and thus is leaving out a lot of customers who could potentially receive an email is something basic, but really hard to guess without proper monitoring in place.
Keeping track of all the steps and every single factor for each task run, provides with a great deal of information for data-driven decision making.

It is highly recommended to use analytics visualization or monitoring tools like Grafana.
They display effectively the status of tasks among others, in real time and in a very easy to understand way. Who can resist to a flashy and colorful chart?!

So…

This was the overview of the abandoned cart process. As you could see this is a feature that needs to be designed taking your very special needs into account.
You may not need too many filters or you may need many more, for example, if you just run a site you will not need certain logic that we apply here.
If you need to implement abandoned cart emails, keep in mind the three steps and you’ll be relishing the success of this project.

Now, if you ever get one of those, you’ll know all it had to happen before you got the email :-)