I have many questions about items in cart and abandonments, hope I can find answers here
How long items saved in cart? If the customer add items in cart, how long they will kept their?
And if they open the cart after few days and didn’t find items added (also not found as an abandonment), is their a way to retrieve them?
When the cart added as ana abandonment? in which step of checkout? If customer closed the browser before adding the shipping information, can the cart added in the abandonment list?
Thank you for reaching out and posting these questions!
I understand that you’d like to learn more about abandoned carts and I’d be happy to clarify in point form for clarity as well.
When a customer abandons their cart in the Online store, the item(s) have not yet been purchased and can still be purchased in the future by a different customer. While abandoned carts wouldn’t serve as a means for reserving products, you can reserve items through draft orders - this will protect the item(s) in the cart until the reservation expires. If you’re using Shopify POS, then you can also save and retrieve a cart on Shopify POS.
Abandoned carts are saved for 30 days in the Shopify admin and 15 days for the customers, unless a customer decides to clear their browser’s caches removing the history of their cart. If the abandoned cart disappears from the admin or was never created in the first place, then you wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. However, if the cart disappeared for the customer and it’s still in your admin, then you can recover the abandoned cart and send an email to the customer containing a link to their abandoned checkout.
An abandoned cart is created when a customer has items added to their cart, completes the customer information page, and proceeds to the next page of checkout.
I hope this clarifies your questions and I’d love to hear more about your business! What kinds of products are you selling? Do you have a marketing plan prepared for your business?
And are you sure that it is only 30 days in Shopify admin? We have many abandonments in our list from May 28, are their links inactive and empty? all before May 28 are only recovered.
Thank you for following up and sharing the additional context!
If you’re looking for the specific cookies, then we’ve got a breakdown of them right over here: Shopify Cookie Policy. From there, you can find a list of cookies as well as their durations.
There are some circumstances that could potentially allow an abandoned cart to remain longer than 30 days, which can be indicative that the customer is still making updates to their cart. However, the abandoned cart is purged when there haven’t been any updates in one month, which may be a more common scenario in most cases.
Checkouts that aren’t draft orders and haven’t converted to orders will be purged if:
They were created more than 3 months ago.
They haven’t been updated in 1 month.
They don’t have a transaction attached to them (any transaction data will prevent deletion, failed or not).
Once a checkout is three months or older, it will be scheduled for the next clean up on the following Monday. As for the abandoned carts that you’re seeing dating back to May, it’s possible that they have a failed transaction attached to them and the cart link has long expired. That being said, if there’s a particular abandoned checkout that you wish to retain, then you can consider creating a draft order with the same details.
If you have any other questions on this topic, don’t hesitate to let me know!
When an abandoned cart doesn’t have transactions attached to them, it means that there haven’t been any payment attempts made (eg. failed transactions). That being said, you can view an order’s timeline to see if there are any logged payment events.
You can’t change the abandoned cart to a draft order. However, as previously mentioned, you can create a draft order and copy the information from the abandoned cart. This way, you can preserve the abandoned cart for longer than 3 months.
It sounds like you have quite a few abandoned carts. If you’d like, you can share your store URL with me and I’d be happy to see if I can share some feedback on what I notice!
Thanks a lot for your support. I’m asking in details since I want to share this information with customer support team to be able to answer customers questions about their carts.
I appreciate your time answering all my questions. Thanks a lot
