Abandoned Cart Recovery for WooCommerce

Abandoned Cart Recovery for WooCommerce is a plugin that tracks carts left behind before checkout and brings the customer back with a reminder email containing a personal link. One click and every item is back in the cart, with the checkout address already filled in. Carts belonging to logged-in customers are recorded straight away; guest carts as soon as the customer has entered an e-mail address at checkout.

Viber or SMS reminder

Many shoppers leave only a phone number at checkout and never type an e-mail. With Pro those carts come back too: after the delay you set, the shopper gets one short Viber message with a link to the saved cart, and an SMS if the number has no Viber or the message is not delivered. Messages go out through your own TurboSMS account, so you pay your own rate.

The plugin writes once per cart and never at night: quiet hours are a setting, and a message that falls into them goes out in the morning. The Viber/SMS link is separate from the e-mail link, so one never cancels the other. Before going live you can check the balance and send yourself a test message right from the settings screen.

Checkout error log

An abandoned cart does not always mean “changed my mind”. Some shoppers get all the way to checkout, hit a red message and leave. Since 1.3.0 the plugin records exactly those moments: what failed validation, what the payment gateway refused, what broke in the browser — and how many shoppers never placed an order afterwards.

The report holds four kinds of record: form validation — with the name of the field that failed; payment — the gateway refusal together with the payment method; JavaScript — a script error on the checkout page, which usually points at a theme or third-party plugin conflict; and other — an expired session, for example. Both checkouts are covered: the classic one is caught server-side, the block one through failed Store API responses, and whatever the browser showed before the form was even submitted is sent by the plugin’s own script.

No personal data goes into the log. Names, e-mail addresses and long numbers inside an error message are masked; only the message itself, the code, the field, the page path without its query string and a short browser signature are stored. Recording can be switched off entirely, or kept server-side only with the browser part disabled. Limits: at most 5 reports per page view and 300 per hour for the whole store. Rows are cleared by your retention period and never live longer than 180 days in any case, and “Erase personal data” in the WordPress tools removes them together with the cart.

How it works, step by step

1. The customer builds a cart. Logged-in customers are recorded straight away; guests as soon as they enter an e-mail address at checkout. Works with both the classic and Checkout Blocks checkout.
2. After a set period of inactivity (60 minutes by default) a background scan marks the cart as abandoned.
3. After the chosen delay a reminder email is sent with a personal link. The subject and body are editable, with placeholders available: {customer_name}, {cart_items}, {recovery_link}, {store_name}.
4. Clicking the link restores the cart and fills the checkout with the address already known. Once the customer places an order, the cart automatically moves to recovered.
5. With Pro: instead of one email, a chain of up to three is sent — each with its own delay, subject and body — and from the second email on (the starting email is configurable) a personal discount coupon can be added automatically. The store owner gets a Telegram notification for every abandoned cart.

Under the hood

• Nothing extra is collected — no personal data is stored from anonymous browsing. A guest cart is only recorded once the customer has entered an e-mail address at checkout.
• The recovery link is safe to email — a 32-character random token, with only its SHA-256 hash stored in the database, compared via hash_equals(); the token is single-use and is stripped from the address bar as soon as the cart is restored.
• Two background jobs: a scan every 15 minutes (catcode_abandoned_cart_scan) marks abandoned carts and sends emails; a daily job (catcode_abandoned_cart_cleanup) closes expired carts and clears data past the retention period.
• Both checkouts feed one table: the classic checkout is captured server-side via update_order_review, the block checkout sends the e-mail to the plugin’s own REST route as soon as the field is filled in.
• Pro coupons are genuine WooCommerce coupons, not a text placeholder: one-time use, tied to that customer’s e-mail, with their own expiry date.
• English interface with a complete Ukrainian translation.
• A phone only when it is needed: while the Viber/SMS reminder is off, the plugin stores no phone numbers at all. When it is on, it talks only to api.turbosms.ua — one message per cart with its own one-time token.

How licensing works

• The key arrives by email after payment (or immediately if you took the trial). Paste it into settings and click “Activate key”.
• Checked on the CatCode server. A trial key lasts exactly its 7 days.
• “Unlink license” frees up the slot — the key can be activated on another domain right away, no need to contact support.
• Someone else’s key won’t work: the key is tied to this specific module, not to “CatCode” in general.