What Is an Abandoned Cart?

An abandoned cart occurs when a user adds products to their shopping cart but leaves the website without completing the purchase. This behavior is common in e-commerce and represents a significant opportunity for re-engagement and conversion. Recovering abandoned carts is a powerful marketing strategy that allows brands to:

• Reconnect with users who showed purchase intent.
• Send personalized reminders or incentives.
• Increase conversion rates and reduce lost revenue.

How Abandoned Cart Detection Works

Splio Predictive CDP uses web tracking events to detect abandoned carts in real time. The detection logic relies on a combination of user actions and exclusion rules.

Detection Logic:

• A cart is considered abandoned if:
  • The user added products to the cart.
  • The user did not complete a purchase.
  • The user did not reach the thank-you page.
• A 30 minute buffer is applied after the last qualifying event to avoid capturing carts still in progress.

Timeframes:

• Events are analyzed within a 3 day window to determine recent user behavior.
• Only carts older than 30 minutes are considered abandoned.

Contact matching:

If a user's contact does not yet exist in the database at the time of cart detection, the cart will not be sent immediately. However, it remains eligible for recovery for up to 3 days, allowing time for the contact to be created and matched before the cart is discarded.

Required Events for Detection

To enable abandoned cart detection, the following web tracking events must be implemented:

• Add To Cart: Triggered when a user adds a product to their cart.
• Remove From Cart: Triggered when a user removes a product from their cart (helps reconstruct a realistic cart by adjusting quantities and excluding removed items).
• Thank You Page View: Triggered when a user reaches the purchase confirmation page (used to exclude carts that resulted in a successful transaction.).

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Note for Shopify Connector Users: If your setup includes the Shopify connector, you can safely disable the abandoned_checkout scope. With Splio’s web tracking, abandoned carts are reconstructed using add_to_cart and remove_from_cart events, making the abandoned_checkout event redundant for cart recovery purposes.

How These Events Work Together

The Splio CDP combines these events to:

• Reconstruct the cart using Add to Cart and Remove from Cart events.
• Exclude completed purchases using Thank You Page View events.
• Generate synthetic order IDs to track cart sessions.

This multi-event approach ensures that only truly abandoned carts are targeted, improving the relevance and effectiveness of recovery campaigns.