Saved orders and abandoned carts overview

Saved orders

A user who is logged into the storefront can select the Save Order button on the Cart page to save an order for later review. The saved order is retrieved through the use of a cookie which records the Cart ID. The details of the order, along with the Cart ID, are saved in the eCommerce database. When the user returns and logs in, the site retrieves the order details from the database and displays the order for the user. Guest shoppers cannot save orders and upon leaving the shopping session will lose their cart.

Use and setup

Saved orders are stored and managed within the My Account menu. Select a saved order to open the Saved Order Details page, where a user can delete or submit the saved order using the provided buttons. The option to disable saved orders is controlled via the SavedOrders_Enabled Website Setting. The option to enable or disable saving a cart is controlled with the Saved Orders setting.

Abandoned carts

If a user leaves the site without saving an order or checking out, the order changes to a status of Abandoned Cart once it reaches the number of days in the Number of Days to Retain Items in Cart setting.

Two settings control how abandoned carts behave:

• Number of Days to Retain Items in Cart sets the number of days before carts expire. After this number of days, the cart changes to an Abandoned Cart status and will no longer be accessible after the next nightly maintenance job is run. Default value: 7.
• Impacts to the End User:
  • Cookies must be enabled in the shopper's browser.
  • If the user has not logged in, the cookie will contain the Cart ID, but the Cart ID will not be tied to a User ID.
  • If the user has logged in to the site, the cookie will contain a Cart ID, and the Cart ID will be tied to the User ID.
  • The cookie will not contain all the items in the shopping cart. The items will be stored in the eCommerce database and tied to the Cart ID in the cookie.
• Number of Days to Retain Expired sets the number of days before expired carts are deleted. If this is set to '0' they will be deleted the next time nightly maintenance is run. Default value: 90.

Example of status changes for abandoned carts

1. A customer logs into the site and adds items to the shopping cart.
2. The Number of Days to Retain Items in Cart equals 0 and the Number of Days to Retain Expired Carts equals 1.
3. The customer leaves the site without saving the order or checking out.
4. After the nightly maintenance job runs that night, the order's status within Cart History changes to Abandoned Cart, so it is expired and no longer accessible.
5. The following day, the system removes the expired cart during the nightly maintenance job.

Send abandoned cart email reminders

You can send an email reminder to the customer who abandoned a cart based on a setting to enable this functionality and set a time limit on when to send the email. The email uses a designated email template. See Send Abandoned Cart Email Reminders for more details.

Track abandoned carts using cart history

You can use B2B Analytics and/or Google Analytics to track activities like Abandoned Carts. In the Admin Console, you can use the Sales > Cart History table to filter by the Status of AbandonedCart and a Created On or Order Date date range to view how many abandoned carts occurred during a particular time period.

Restore an abandoned cart

You can restore a customer's abandoned cart in the Admin Console.

1. Enable Master Edit Mode so Cart History is editable.
2. In Sales > Cart History, click Edit for the desired AbandonedCart record to open the Order Details.
3. Change the Status of desired record to Cart.
4. Change OrderDate to fit within setting Number of Days to Retain Items in Cart (carts outside this date range won't be accessible on storefront). You can find this setting at Administration > System > Settings > Order Management > Abandoned Carts.

Server farms and lost carts

Occasionally there are reports of a user losing a cart. Typically this is due to the shopper hitting a server farm, possibly causing the session to be lost. As long as a user remains active on the site, the cart will not be lost. However, if a user leaves their shopping session for a period of time, the following scenario is possible:

In a multi-server farm environment, a shopper starts his shopping engagement on one server within a farm and, after being inactive for a period of time or leaving the session, gets redirected to a different server within the same farm. This would result in a lost cart because the shopping session is server specific. The lost cart will be handled based on the situations explained above.

Saved carts and deactivated products

Deactivated products are not automatically deleted from saved carts. As a result, a situation could arise where a user places an item in a cart that is saved, but not submitted. The user returns to the saved cart at a later time to submit the order. However, in between the time the cart was left and revisited, the item in the cart was deactivated. The solution to this scenario would be to create an integration job with a custom post-processor. The post-processor would query the database for orders that contain deactivated products, remove the products and then re-save the order.

Saved orders and out-of-stock products

If you have backorders disabled, when users place a Saved Order, out-of-stock products are added to the cart with a message that some products are low in stock and checkout is disabled. If all products are out of stock, the Saved Order details page disables the option to place an order.