When a shopper types their email at checkout and leaves without ordering, or a logged-in customer leaves items in their cart, Tendlio saves that checkout or cart on the Recover sales page. Once you switch the emails on, each of those shoppers gets a reminder with their cart, and a checkout that still hasn’t turned into an order gets an offer later.
You will learn #
- What Tendlio saves, and how to start saving
- What the Carts tab shows, and how to follow up by hand
- How Tendlio times the offer from your own shoppers
- How to set up the two emails and switch them on
- What keeps a shopper from getting too many emails
Before you begin #
- Set up email sending. Recovery emails go out through the sending method you set up on the Email sending page, and only once sending there is switched to Live. Until then you can save carts, preview both emails and send tests to yourself.
- Enable coupons in WooCommerce. The offer comes with a coupon code, and WooCommerce only accepts coupon codes when coupons are enabled under WooCommerce → Settings → General. If coupons stay off, shoppers get the reminder only.
- To offer free shipping, let a coupon switch it on. Tendlio can only offer free shipping when every shipping zone you ship to has a Free shipping method that a coupon alone can unlock: its Free shipping requires setting is A valid free shipping coupon or A minimum order amount OR a coupon. If any zone doesn’t have one, the offer is a discount instead.
Start saving abandoned checkouts and carts #
- In your WordPress admin, open Tendlio → Customers → Recover sales.
- Click the Settings and email tab.
- Next to Capture, turn on Capture abandoned checkouts (email entered) + logged-in carts.
- Click Save settings.
From then on, Tendlio saves two kinds of basket, and nobody gets an email until you switch the emails on:
- A checkout: a shopper typed their email at checkout and left. It counts as abandoned once they’ve been gone for 120 minutes, or for the time you set under Reminder email.
- A cart: a logged-in customer added items and left. It counts as abandoned after 3 days with no activity, or the days you set under Cart cutoff.
A guest who never types an email isn’t saved, because there’s no address to write to.
Read the Carts tab #
The Carts tab has two cards over a list of the checkouts and carts that count as abandoned and haven’t come back, with the biggest basket first. A checkout joins the list once its Reminder email time has passed, and a cart once its Cart cutoff has.
- Open, at risk counts them, with the value of what’s in them. Returned (30 days) counts the ones whose shoppers came back and ordered in the last 30 days, with the value of those baskets. During your first 30 days of saving carts, the card is called Returned since start.
- Each row shows the shopper’s name and email, how long ago the basket counted as abandoned, and the basket. Copy message copies a ready message that you can paste into your own email.
- Click a row to open it. You see the items, whether it’s a Checkout or a Cart, and the offer it would get: Free shipping, a percentage off such as 10% off, or Reminder (no offer), which is what a cart gets. Generate coupon creates this shopper’s code, so the message you copy includes it. Send test to me sends the offer this shopper would get, or the reminder when there’s no offer, to your own test address.
When more baskets are open than the list shows, a note above the list says so.
See report →, at the top of the page, opens Recovery & reviews, which shows how many checkouts and carts came back and what they were worth.
Let Tendlio learn when your shoppers come back #
Some shoppers come back and order on their own. The Insights tab measures how long that takes in your store, under When do they come back?:
- Two figures, Half are back within and Most are back by, say how long your shoppers took.
- The measurement counts checkouts only, timed from when Tendlio saved them. Shoppers who finished in the same visit never left, so they aren’t counted. Shoppers who got a recovery email aren’t counted either, because the email may be what brought them back.
- Saved carts are measured separately, under Saved carts: when do they come back?, because a cart sits for days before it counts as abandoned.
Once about 15 shoppers have come back on their own, and while no recovery emails are going out, Tendlio sets when the offer email goes: just past the point where most of them are back. It never sets the offer less than 20 hours after the reminder, or later than 48 hours after the shopper left. The tab then says what it set and on which day. Undo, back to … puts the earlier time back and makes the time yours, so Tendlio stops moving it. Set it yourself opens the field, so you can type your own time. For saved carts, Tendlio sets the Cart cutoff the same way, but only ever makes it longer, and never past 7 days.
If you’ve typed your own offer time, Tendlio leaves it alone and the tab suggests a time instead. Use this sets the suggested time and hands the setting back to Tendlio, so Tendlio moves the time again as it learns.
At the top of the tab, Did it work? counts the checkouts and carts that came back, and once your emails go out, it shows which ones your emails brought back. At the bottom, What gets left behind lists the products shoppers leave in their carts most often, and the ones most often in carts that came back.
Set up the two emails #
On the Settings and email tab:
- Reminder email sets when the reminder goes, in minutes after the shopper left the checkout. It starts at 120. The reminder shows their cart and has no offer in it. This time is always yours: Tendlio never changes it.
- Offer email sets when the offer goes, in hours after the shopper left. The offer goes only to shoppers who got the reminder and still haven’t ordered. The field starts at 24. Until you type your own time, Tendlio moves it to fit your shoppers, as the Insights tab describes. You can set the offer anywhere from 20 hours after the reminder to 48 hours after the shopper left.
- Cart cutoff sets how many days a logged-in customer’s cart can sit untouched before it counts as abandoned and gets its reminder. It starts at 3. A cart gets the reminder only, never an offer.
- Free-shipping threshold is your store’s free-shipping minimum. A checkout gets free shipping as its offer when its basket is under this amount, or when the shopper was being charged for shipping. The others get the discount. If you leave the field at 0, only the shipping charge decides.
- Minimum basket for an offer: a checkout below this basket value gets the reminder and no offer. At 0, every checkout can get an offer.
- Discount % is the discount in the offer when free shipping isn’t the right one, for example when shipping was already free. It starts at 10, and it doesn’t apply to products that are already on sale.
- Under The recovery emails, write the Reminder subject, Reminder message, Offer subject and Offer message. If you leave a field blank, the email uses the text shown in gray. Below them you can change every other line (the greeting, the offer lines, the button and the unsubscribe wording), and the theme, colors and font, so you can reword the emails or write them in your store’s language. Until you turn on Customize colors, the emails use the brand and accent colors you set on the Email sending page. Tendlio adds the cart items, the offer with its code, the button back to the cart and the unsubscribe link itself, so no edit can break them.
- Check the previews on the right. Live preview: reminder email and Live preview: offer email show each email with sample products. Each shopper gets the items from their own cart.
- Click Save settings.
To see an email in your own inbox, go to Send a recovery test under the form. Pick Reminder email or Offer email, type your address or leave it blank to use the test addresses saved on the Email sending page, and click Send sample test. A test creates no coupon, and it works while automatic sending is off.
Switch the emails on #
Before you turn the emails on, read the line under Automatic recovery emails. It says how many of the carts and checkouts you’ve already saved are still inside their wait times. Only those can still get an automatic reminder. Older ones stay in your history and never get an email.
- On the Settings and email tab, next to Automatic recovery emails, turn on Send recovery emails automatically after the wait time, and click Save settings.
- Open the Email sending page and switch sending to Live. Until you do, no recovery email reaches a shopper.
On a staging copy of your store, Tendlio sends no emails to shoppers, and tests to yourself still work.
Tip: If you already send cart reminders from another email platform, leave Automatic recovery emails off, so shoppers don’t get two. Tendlio keeps saving carts, and the rest of Tendlio works as usual.
Who gets an email, and how often #
- A checkout gets the reminder when its Reminder email time is up. It gets the offer at its Offer email time, and only if the shopper still hasn’t ordered.
- A saved cart gets the reminder only.
- A shopper who orders before an email is due doesn’t get it. If a shopper empties their cart, the emails that were still waiting for it don’t go.
- A shopper gets at most one offer in 7 days, however often they leave a checkout. A new reminder never goes within 24 hours of the last recovery email to the same person.
- Tendlio sends at most 50 recovery emails a day. The rest wait until the next day.
- Every email has an unsubscribe link, and shoppers who have unsubscribed are skipped.
In Advanced mode, you can change the 7 days under Send frequency and the daily number under Daily recovery email limit, both on the Settings and email tab.
Tendlio doesn’t add a consent checkbox to your checkout. In many places a started checkout counts as a soft opt-in for this kind of reminder, and the same rules ask that the customer can say no just as easily, so every email carries an unsubscribe link. Which rule applies to you depends on where you sell, so check your own. Who you can email (consent, in plain words) explains the rules in more detail.
Let the reminder follow your cookie banner #
If your cookie banner asks shoppers about marketing, the reminder can follow their answer. The setting, Marketing consent, appears on the Settings and email tab once you have the free WP Consent API plugin and a cookie banner that works with it. With Don’t send the reminder to shoppers who declined marketing in your cookie banner turned on, a shopper who declined still has their cart saved and listed, marked No reminder: declined marketing. They get no reminder, and so no offer either.
Check that saving carts works #
Tendlio keeps an eye on your checkout. If several orders came through it in the last 48 hours but no carts were saved, a warning appears on the Carts tab, and a card on your to-do list, with the likely cause:
- If nothing from your checkout reaches Tendlio, the warning points to a caching or speed plugin that blocks Tendlio’s small script on the checkout page. Exclude the checkout page from caching, and exclude recovery-capture.js from any “delay” or “defer” JavaScript option.
- If carts reach Tendlio but can’t be saved, the warning points to a database problem on your site.
- If Tendlio’s safety limits turned away checkout attempts and no real cart got through, the warning points to automated traffic, such as a performance test, an uptime monitor or a bot hitting your checkout page.
If too few shoppers reached your checkout in those 48 hours to tell whether it works, a calmer note says so instead of the warning.
The warning and the calmer note both have Test it now: open your checkout in test mode. To check your checkout after a fix, click it, then open Help → System status. Under Cart capture, Last test ping says a few seconds ago when the script works. The warning itself goes away once your checkout saves a real shopper’s cart. To test when there’s no warning, for example after you change a caching or speed plugin, open your checkout with ?tendlio_capture_test=1 added to its address.
Why recovery works this way #
The reminder comes first, without an offer #
A shopper who only needed a nudge comes back after the reminder and pays full price. If the offer went first, shoppers who were going to come back anyway would get your discount too.
The offer waits for your shoppers’ own timing #
The offer is for the shoppers who didn’t come back by themselves. Once Tendlio has measured your store, it sends the offer just past the time by which most of your returning shoppers are back. If it went earlier, part of your discounts would go to shoppers who were about to order anyway.
Tendlio stops moving the offer time once emails go out #
Once emails go out, many shoppers get the reminder before they’d have come back on their own, and a shopper who got an email drops out of the measurement. What’s left to measure are the shoppers who came back before their reminder, so the times would read shorter than they are.
Free shipping for some shoppers, a discount for others #
The offer is aimed at what may have stopped the order. A shopper who was paying for shipping gets free shipping. When shipping was already free, a discount is the only thing left to offer. If every item in the cart is already on sale, a discount wouldn’t apply, so the shopper gets free shipping instead, or no offer if free shipping isn’t possible.
A saved cart gets no offer #
A logged-in customer can build a cart over several days, so a cart that sits isn’t necessarily an order they walked away from. Tendlio reminds them of it, and keeps the discount for checkouts, where the shopper was about to pay.
Additional resources #
- How to set up email sending and switch it to Live: the sending method and the switch to Live.
- Who you can email (consent, in plain words)
- Coupons the plugin creates (and cleans up): the offer’s coupon code.
- How sending works: waiting emails, the daily limit and email analytics
- Staging copies and moving your store
- What your to-do list can catch: the cards about abandoned checkouts.
- Do abandoned cart emails work? When they do and how to check
- Abandoned cart discounts: when to offer one, and how much
Frequently asked questions #
Does Tendlio email shoppers as soon as I turn on capture? #
No. Capture only saves checkouts and carts. Emails go out once you turn on Automatic recovery emails and switch sending to Live on the Email sending page.
Why did a shopper get no offer? #
An offer goes out only when all of these hold: the basket is a checkout, not a saved cart; the shopper got the reminder (they didn't decline marketing in your cookie banner, unsubscribe or empty their cart); they haven't ordered by the offer time; the basket is at least your Minimum basket for an offer; they haven't had an offer in the last 7 days; WooCommerce coupons are on; and there's an offer the cart can use (when every item is already on sale, the discount doesn't apply, and free shipping has to be possible instead).
Can I send the reminder myself instead? #
Yes. On the Carts tab, open a row, click Generate coupon if you want the offer in it, and use Copy message to paste a ready message into your own email.