Welcome to your guide to setting up WooCommerce abandoned cart automation. If you love complete freedom and flexibility, you're going to love what our developers came up with to make it happen.

Unlike other abandoned-cart solutions, the Emercury abandoned cart solution is "unopinionated". This means that our plugin simply triggers an event, and an associated automation. This is on purpose because it allows you to setup your automation to work in whatever way you intend. It can be as simple, or as elaborate as you wish.

The first step is to install our WooCommerce plugin here. Once you do so, you can find the "Emercury Abandon Cart" tab. On top you will notice two fields. This is where the magic happens. But before we look at setting up those two fields, let's talk about the setup on the Emercury side.

You will want to set up a dedicated list in Ecommerce. For example it might be named "WooCommerce Abandoned Carts", or whatever makes sense for you.

Next, add an automation. Again, it might make sense to call it something like "WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails"

This is at the heart of how this plugin works. If someone abandons a cart, we automatically add them to a list for you. And then we make their product data available to an automation of your choosing.

This is to allow for complete flexibility in how you handle a person who abandoned their cart. You can build out the automation however you want, with as few or as many conditions as you want.

Just plug in the IDs from the automation and list that you created in the previous step

The only requirement is that you set the automation to trigger whenever someone is added to the list we set up above.

In this image we have the first required step, that is a trigger tied to adding anyone to our special list. And then we just have a send-message action as the very first step. You can have as many steps or make your automation as complex as you desire.

Whilst sending a generic email that just says "you left something in your cart" and linking to your site is better than nothing, you probably want more than that. This is where the magic happens.

You can edit the email to dynamically show information based on the state of their abandoned cart and the items they left inside. All you have to do is to use the merge-tags we provide for you. For your convenience you can see all of them listed in the WordPress plugin, like so:

For example if you want your email to dynamically show the name of the first product, you would use the {products.1.product_name} merge tag. And if you want to show the product image, you use {products.1.product_image}.

Please note that due to the nature of how WordPress and WooCommerce work, the plugin utilizes WordPress cron events. These are special scheduled actions that run on certain intervals. In the case of abandoned cart, the associated scheduling runs every 12 hours.

This means that if a person fills up their cart and leaves the site, they don't immediately trigger an "abandoned cart" event. It can take as long as 12 hours, based on the cron job.

However, whilst this makes sense for real world customers, if you're impatient to see how the process works you can trigger a cron run manually. Just install the WP Crontrol plugin here. Next, you can go to the newly-found option called "scheduled actions". You will find it under tools. Inside you should find this cron schedule:

You will notice a run option. This will run the cron immediatelly, and not wait until the 12 hour mark. With this you can easily test how the abandoned cart automation works.

If you want to test the entire process, here is the most convenient way to do so, taking it step by step

1) Go to wordpress users > add new , and set up a test user with a test email address. Make note of the user name and password.

2) Next, logout from your admin account, or go to a different browser if you have one, and login as the new test user

3) Fill up the cart with some items, and then leave the page

If you have set up everything correctly, in 12 hours this email address will get whatever emails you have set up in the associated automation.

However, if you want to test it immediately and not wait for the real-world timing, just utilize the cron tool we mentioned above. If you click run on the cron job, that automation will instantly trigger for said user.

And if you have an email send setup as the first step in your automation, it means that the test user will get that email the moment you triggered the cron.