The list of core features from Prodigy Commerce continues to grow, with its new, built-in abandoned cart recovery tool for managing lost checkouts, viewing customer details, and customizing the checkout recovery emails for your own brand. Not to mention, Prodigy offers automation and batch checkout recovery emails to cut down on the time business owners spend reconnecting those customers with their carts.
Click here to learn how to access the abandoned cart recovery features in Prodigy.
This is an exciting time for those developing, or planning to develop, stores on the Prodigy platform with WordPress, seeing as how the abandoned cart recovery element offers a win-win situation for developers and their clients:
- WordPress developers have a powerful, free cart abandonment feature to offer clients, one that’s usually a premium tool from other eCommerce platforms.
- Site owners save money by not having to pay for an abandoned cart extension.
- Your site owner clients increase their efficiency with bulk and automated checkout recovery emails.
- Sales are bound to improve with abandoned cart recovery, making clients happy and opening up more spending room for development.
Thanks to FinancesOnline, we know that abandoned carts account for $4.6 trillion in losses for online retailers, with abandonment rates going over 80% for the travel and finance industries and ranging from 64.2% to 81.1% for the top eCommerce industries.
In short, cart abandonment is a problem.
Luckily, there’s no lack of a solution. eCommerce platforms and plugin developers have offered abandoned cart recovery tools for years. However, those tools can get expensive, and you often must install a third-party plugin to make it all work.
As with everything, Prodigy saw this as an opportunity to assist developers, particularly those stuck with WooCommerce’s abandoned cart limitations. Prodigy embraced that opportunity with a free, all-in-one abandoned cart solution with features for automation, email design, and more.
Explore the exciting new features below:
A Simple, Filterable List of Abandoned Checkouts
All abandoned checkouts on a website get logged and combined into one convenient area of the Prodigy Commerce Dashboard. These instances of lost carts appear right by your orders in the dashboard. The list compiles each by date and provides quick details like:
- The date the cart was abandoned.
- Customer name.
- Email status.
- Recovery status.
- The total value of the cart.
- A unique abandoned cart identification number.
The Email Status of each abandoned checkout changes from Not Sent to Sent to alert you whether you need to notify that customer with a convincing email to return and finish the checkout.
You can also see the Recovery Status, a wonderful way to identify the success of your recovery efforts. The status changes to Recovered when a customer comes back and completes the transaction. The Not Recovered status indicates you either need to send out a recovery email or potentially revise the content of your emails.
Organization and speed are key to finding and managing abandoned checkouts. That’s why Prodigy incorporates a search bar and filter panel to type in specific keywords (like customer names), or to filter out items to only show those checkouts where an email has not been sent.
Super Detailed Abandoned Checkout Information for Each Instance
Knowing the name of your customer, and the date on which the abandonment took place, helps with the process, but there’s so much more to learn to correctly analyze your missed sales and why people left those carts in the first place.
That’s why Prodigy offers an in-depth section for every abandoned checkout, complete with product information, cart totals, shipping addresses, and more.
The quick Recovery Email button serves as a manual option for contacting the customers.
You can even utilize an outside email delivery system by copying the recovery link from Prodigy into something like Mailchimp or Constant Contact.
A Built-in Recovery Email Customizer
Convincing, simple emails prompt customers to complete their abandoned carts. That’s why the abandoned checkout module provides a way to customize all emails that go out, with options to modify the subject line and message.
There’s a button to send a test email, and the customization module supports custom coding to add anything you want for your clients, including buttons to complete a purchase, information about the cart, or even coupon links.
Recovery Email Automation and Bulk Sending
Site owners have the ability to manually send abandoned checkout emails, but developers can speed up that process by activating the automated email system, with the following options for sending:
- Send automated emails to anyone who left the checkout.
- Only send automated emails to email subscribers who abandon the checkout.
Timing comes into play as well, with settings to send those emails after the following intervals:
- 1 hour.
- 6 hours.
- 10 hours.
- 24 hours.
Finally, Prodigy provides a middle ground for those who would rather not automatically send abandoned cart emails, but find it tedious to handle each one manually.
You can bulk send recovery emails by selecting a number of abandoned checkouts from the main list and choosing to send a recovery email to all selected.
The Primary Advantage: It’s Free and Natively-developed
Like all aspects of Prodigy Commerce, the abandoned cart recovery functionality is fully integrated with the eCommerce platform, meaning it’s included as a built-in feature, not a completely different extension or plugin.
Furthermore, you don’t have to pay a dime to activate abandoned carts, making it rather appealing compared to the almost exclusively paid solutions from the likes of other platforms.
| Abandoned Cart Recovery |  |
 |
|---|---|---|
| Natively-developed? | Yes. | No. |
| Built-in or plugin required? | Built-in. | Plugins required, all of which are from different developers. |
| Pricing | Free. | The recommended plugin from WooCommerce starts at $59 per year. |
Seeing as how WooCommerce lacks any native abandoned cart recovery functionality, we can’t make any direct feature comparisons. However, WooCommerce recommends the Addify Abandoned Cart Recovery extension as its official abandoned cart solution, so let’s compare those features with Prodigy.
| Abandoned Cart Recovery | |
 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free. | $59 per year. | Free for WooCommerce, but a premium plugin is needed. |
| Natively-developed for its eCommerce platform? | Yes. | No. | No. |
| Abandoned cart and recovery dashboard with a list | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Email and recovery status | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Bulk recovery emails | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Cart details like customer, email, and products | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Ability to send from other email systems | Yes. | No. | No. |
| History log for each abandoned cart | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Customizer for checkout recovery email | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Recovery email automation | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
Why is Abandoned Cart Recovery So Important?
It’s inevitable that some customers will leave and come back to your online store, while others may never return. There’s nothing wrong with that. Yet, eCommerce businesses leave a significant amount of money on the table due to one problem: they lack abandoned cart functionality.
In our world of detailed analytics, all brands should know how and why users abandoned their carts. In addition, they should have the capabilities to contact customers to bring them back to the site to finish the purchase.
Abandoned cart recovery strives to boost sales. But it also works to reveal more structural problems in your site design or business strategies. After all, you might figure out that the shipping costs are too high, or the checkout is confusing, or there are too many fields to fill in.
Without an abandoned cart tool, you lose all this insight. It’s also crucial to combine an abandoned cart tool with powerful analytics, like how Prodigy integrates with Google Analytics for a full view of customer interactions.
Overall, abandoned cart recovery matters for the following primary reasons:
It Reveals Issues in Your Shopping Experience
OnePoll surveyed digital shoppers in the US and found the main reason for cart abandonment involved high shipping costs. Other abandonment reasons included problems with discount codes, slow shipping, and having to re-enter credit card and shipping information.
These results not only reveal the necessity for cart abandonment recovery, but also show that you can’t figure out this type of information without tracking those who come to your site and leave without notice. The cart abandonment features automate much of the process for you and pinpoint areas of your site to improve.
Recovery Emails Boost Sales and Minimize Losses
From a global perspective, checkout optimization and recovery emails have the potential to accumulate $260 billion in eCommerce sales that otherwise would have been lost to abandoned carts.
In fact, when properly implemented, 99Firms states that 28.3% of all revenue in eCommerce comes from abandoned cart recovery emails.
Abandoned Checkout Emails are Wildly Effective
That increase in revenue is a result of the high success rates with abandoned cart emails:
- 40% of recovery emails get opened.
- There’s a 4.64% conversion rate with recovery emails.
- Non-profits see a 56.84% open rate for recovery emails.
And it makes sense, considering these users had shown an interest in purchasing but became distracted or frustrated for some reason. Sending abandoned cart recovery emails yields an exponentially higher ROI than fresh marketing campaigns designed to acquire new customers.
Try Prodigy Commerce and Get Free Abandoned Cart Recovery (Without the Extra Plugins!)
If you have further questions about Prodigy Commerce, check out the full platform introduction or send an email to support@prodigycommerce.com. Prodigy helps WordPress developers not only improve their workflows, but also pays them to use this free, not freemium, platform.