What would be a good cart abandoned cut-off time

Hello @cutu234,

Greetings for the day!

It seems you’re utilizing the plugin effectively for testing. Just to clarify, the cut-off time of 90 minutes refers to the period after which the captured data is considered abandoned if the user hasn’t completed the order. This time frame is quite generous, as most users typically don’t take that long to finalize their purchases.

Given that 25 out of the 27 carts tagged as abandoned resulted in actual purchases, I recommend checking whether these orders consist of the same products as those in the abandoned carts or if they involve different products altogether. This distinction can help determine whether the users are completing their orders with different items.

Let me know if you have any further questions or need assistance!

Best regards.

Thank you very much. Honestly, I don’t fully get the idea behind it. Why would it matter? Let’s assume that a customer puts product A in the cart and decides 15 minutes later to remove it and buy product B instead. Why would this have any impact on the cart status as abandoned or not. I absolutely don’t want to bother you or waste your time. I just need a deeper understanding of the mechanism involved. I don’t want to loose orders, yes. But even more important: I absolutely don’t want to bother customers (who acutally purchased something) with emails. This could easily fire back. This is a major issue for a “false-negative” rate of 90% even with a very generous cut-off time.

Hello @cutu234,

Thank you for your thoughtful question.

The way abandoned cart tracking works is by capturing order data at checkout after a customer has added items to the cart, moved to checkout, and filled in their details, including the email field. At this point, the order data is captured but is not yet marked as abandoned.

Here’s how it functions:

1. Once the customer fills in their information and reaches the checkout page, the data is captured but held.
2. The plugin waits for the cut-off time you set in its settings. If the customer leaves the checkout without completing the order, the data will then be marked as “abandoned” only after that cut-off period.
3. However, if the customer completes the purchase within this timeframe, the order is processed as usual and is not flagged as abandoned.

If the customer comes back and finishes the purchase even after the cut-off time, the plugin recognizes this and marks the order as “recovered.” This stops any further abandoned cart emails from being sent, ensuring that only genuinely abandoned carts are followed up.

I hope this clarifies the process! Let me know if you have further questions—happy to help.

Best regards,

Thank you very much for the in-depth explanation. I’m pretty sure that I got the idea how the plugin works. Our issue is that around 90% of all “abandoned” carts are false-positives. In other words: 90% of the customers would get an email (or even worse: several emails), while they actually DID complete the purchase. The rate of 90% is constant since plugin activation. So, this was not an outlier. For test purposes I will increase the cut-off time to 3 hours which seems ridiculously high.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say the plugin is not working properly. This is just a VERY sensitive issue. As a shop owner I have to be extra careful. You can easily put users off by being too pushy.

Hello @cutu234,

Thank you for sharing your feedback and concerns.

To help address the issue, I recommend running a few test orders yourself to see if completed orders are still appearing in the abandoned orders section after being placed.

Additionally, please double-check the plugin settings and ensure that the Processing and Completed order statuses are excluded from tracking. This will help prevent any orders that have been successfully completed from being flagged as abandoned.

Let us know if you notice any patterns or have further questions—we’re here to help!

Best regards,

I increased the cut-off time to 180 minutes. Now, 92% of all “abandoned” orders are false-positives. All statuses but “draft” are excluded.

I’ve just tested it with some test orders. I set the cut-off time to 60 minutes. I put something in the cart (as a guest user) and completed the purchase within 30 minutes. For the second test I completed the purchase after 90 minutes. Both orders were NOT tagged as abandoned. While this is pretty much the opposite effect, it is still not really a success. The second order should have been saved as abandoned. I’m running out of ideas. ?? The test shop does not use caching. So, this could not explain the problem.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by cutu234.

Hi @cutu234,

Thank you for your feedback and for sharing your detailed testing results.

We understand the issue you’re facing with abandoned orders being marked as false positives. I tried replicating the situation on my end by placing multiple orders, but I was unable to reproduce the issue. It seems that further investigation is needed on your site to pinpoint the exact cause.

To move forward, could you kindly open a support ticket through the CartFlows site? This will allow us to take a closer look.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We look forward to assisting you further and getting this sorted.

Best regards,

Will gladly so that. Thank you very much.

Hello @cutu234,

Thanks for writing back.

We see the ticket has been already opened in our support forum. We will work with you to address the issue there.

Best Regards,