Customizing marking shopping carts as abandoned

Xperience marks shopping carts as abandoned with a scheduled task. The scheduled task creates an activity for every abandoned shopping cart. When you then set up a marketing automation process, the system sends an email reminder to customers with an abandoned shopping cart. In the email reminder, there can be, for example, links to the products added to their shopping carts or a link to their shopping cart to continue shopping.

How abandoned shopping cart reminders work

The scenario presumes the situation when a visitor (potentially a future customer) considers purchasing some products but then changes the mind and leaves. Store administrators then want to remind the visitor of the products. To be able to contact a visitor, the system saves the ID of the visitor’s contact to the shopping cart (specifically to the ShoppingCartContactID column in the COM_ShoppingCart database table). In this scenario, visitors can be:

• A registered customer – the customer has a user assigned, the user has a contact assigned.
• An anonymous customer – the visitor has a contact assigned according to their activities. The contact can be:
  • With an email address – the email address is known, for example, from a subscribed newsletter.
  • Without an email address – the visitor did not provide any email address, therefore you cannot reach such visitor.

In the administration interface, you can set after how many hours shopping carts are considered as abandoned (see Walkthrough - Sending an automated reminder of an abandoned shopping cart). Besides that, you can customize the way the system recognizes abandoned shopping carts.

Customizing evaluation whether a shopping cart is abandoned

You can change the evaluation process when the system decides whether the shopping cart is abandoned.

When the scheduled task starts, the system initializes the MarkCartAbandoned class and triggers the Execute method. The Execute method retrieves all shopping carts fulfilling all of the following conditions:

• The shopping cart is non-empty (i.e., the shopping cart contains at least one product).

• The content of the shopping cart has not been changed for the time specified by the Mark shopping cart as abandoned after (hours) setting (the time is determined according to the ShoppingCartLastUpdate database column).

• The shopping cart has not been processed by previous runs of the scheduled task yet.

  If the shopping cart was changed after it was processed by the scheduled task’s previous run (e.g., if the customer opened the shopping cart, changed the products and left again), the shopping cart is then again processed by the scheduled task.

Then you can filter the retrieved shopping carts with the FilterAbandonedCarts method:

protected virtual ObjectQuery<ShoppingCartInfo> FilterAbandonedCarts(ObjectQuery<ShoppingCartInfo> abandonedCarts)
{
    return abandonedCarts;
}

The Execute method then loops through the filtered shopping carts which are labeled as abandoned with the IsShoppingCartAbandoned method:

protected virtual bool IsShoppingCartAbandoned(ShoppingCartInfo cart)
{
    return true;
}

The system then creates a Shopping cart abandoned activity for every looped abandoned shopping cart to its contact that ensures sending the reminder email to the contact.

Example – Creating a custom evaluation of abandoned shopping carts

Implement a class inheriting from the MarkCartAbandoned class to provide your custom logic of evaluating abandoned shopping carts.

1. Prepare an assembly (Class Library project) with class discovery enabled in your Xperience solution (or use an existing one). See Adding custom assemblies. 

   • Reference the project from both your live site and Xperience administration (CMSApp) projects.

2. Create a new class file, for example named CustomAbandonedCartEvaluation.cs.

   • Add custom classes as part of a new assembly (Class Library project) in your solution. You need to add the appropriate references to both the assembly and the Xperience web project.

3. Make the new class inherit from the MarkCartAbandoned class.

4. Override the methods you want to change:

   •  FilterAbandonedCarts – for example, if you do not want to send reminders to registered customers, you can exclude shopping carts containing user ID using the ObjectQuery API.

   • IsShoppingCartAbandoned – for example, if you do not want to send reminders when the shopping cart is paid in euros, you can exclude such shopping carts.

     Example

     Copy

     
     
     
       using System;
     
       using CMS.DataEngine;
       using CMS.Ecommerce;
     
       /// <summary>
       /// Scheduled task implementation for customized evaluation of abandoned shopping carts.
       /// </summary>
       public class CustomAbandonedCartEvaluation : MarkCartAbandoned
       {
           protected override ObjectQuery<ShoppingCartInfo> FilterAbandonedCarts(ObjectQuery<ShoppingCartInfo> abandonedCarts)
           {
               // Gets all abandoned carts where the user ID is not specified
               ObjectQuery<ShoppingCartInfo> filteredCarts = abandonedCarts.WhereNull("ShoppingCartUserID");
     
               return filteredCarts;
           }
     
           protected override bool IsShoppingCartAbandoned(ShoppingCartInfo cart)
           {
               // Checks whether the shopping cart is paid in euros
               if (cart.Currency.CurrencyCode.Equals("EUR", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
               {
                   return false;
               }
     
               return true;
           }
       }
     
     
       

5. Create a new “Abandoned shopping cart” scheduled task in the Scheduled tasks application. Select your CustomAbandonedCartEvaluation class as the Task provider.

The system now excludes shopping carts based on your customization.