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Understand how the abandoned cart model works

Turn your abandoned carts into sales.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated today

Our abandoned cart model gives an in-depth analysis of your customer journeys. By using the conversion window and intelligent inference, it lets us better understand details such as your carts' conversion rates, life cycles, and the optimal time for when a cart is likely to convert into a sale.


Conversion window

The conversion window is the time after your customer creates and abandons a cart where their cart is most likely to be recovered. By analysing millions of abandoned carts, we have determined that a reasonable default is seven days.

The default conversion window is customisable, but before you make changes, it's essential to understand that the abandoned cart life cycle is very short.

Learn more in the section Set the abandoned cart conversion window.

We identify any abandoned carts that are currently within the conversion window as carts most likely to be recovered. These carts are where you should focus your engagement efforts, as these abandoned carts represent your best opportunities for potentially recoverable revenue. This is because customer journeys are likely to be still active, and purchase decisions might still be possible to influence. If you set a large conversion window, you are likely to reduce the accuracy of your reporting.

Inferred conversion

Our abandoned cart JavaScript tracks the status of abandoned carts. When we directly track a cart to an order taking place, we mark the purchase as complete.

However, there are occasions where the customer journey is irregular and disrupted. For example, if a customer changes browser, device, or there was some other reason why we couldn't directly track the cart conversion to an order.

In these cases, the abandoned cart model is able to use inferred conversion. The model looks at each abandoned cart and attempts to find an order placed by the same contact within the conversion window for their cart. If a valid order is found, we define the customer journey as completed even if the cart was not tracked directly to a conversion. When this happens, we add a separate inferredPhase field and mark it as complete for these carts.

Lost carts

When we can't track an abandoned cart to a conversion, or find an inferred conversion within the conversion window, then we define a cart as lost. For lost carts, we set the inferredPhase field to lost.

Separating potentially recoverable carts and lost carts empowers us to give you a higher level of accuracy on your abandoned cart dashboard and analytics.


Set the abandoned cart conversion window

The conversion window is the time after your customer creates and abandons a cart where their cart is most likely to be recovered.

The default conversion window is seven days. You know your own data best, and it's up to you how you set your conversion window.

To manually set your conversion window:

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Commerce > Commerce settings.

  2. Under Abandoned carts conversion window, enter a number (of days) into the Conversion window field.

  3. Select SAVE.

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