Cart Reminder Emails for Abandoned Carts

When a shopper leaves items in their cart and does not buy, Djangify can send them one reminder email. This guide explains who gets it, what it says, when it is not sent, and the one thing self-hosted sites need to set up. On Managed Hosting the schedule is already running for you. Reminders are off until you switch them on in Shop Settings, and while they are off no carts are saved.

Who can be reminded

A reminder needs an email address, so only these shoppers are covered:

• Logged-in customers. Their cart is saved when they add something to it. If they fill a cart first and log in afterwards, it is saved at the moment they log in.
• Guests. Their cart is saved when they type their email address at the guest checkout step. See Guest Checkout and the First Password Email.

A visitor who adds to a cart and leaves without giving an email address is not recorded, because there is nobody to write to. If a guest enters an email that already belongs to an account, they are sent to log in instead, so the same cart is saved against that account.

Saving a cart does not change it. The shopper's own cart works exactly as before.

When the email is sent

The email goes out once the cart has been left alone for the wait time. The default is 4 hours. A scheduled job checks every 15 minutes, so the email can arrive up to 15 minutes after the wait is over. Each cart is emailed once, and one address gets at most one reminder in a single run, even if it has two saved carts.

What the email says

• The items that are still for sale, at today's prices, with the total.
• A Go back to my cart button.
• A link at the bottom to stop cart reminders.

The button puts the saved items back into the cart in whatever browser the shopper opens it in. It does not log anyone in. A guest goes straight to checkout with their email already filled in. If that email has since become an account, they are asked to log in first. Items already in the cart are left alone, and items that are no longer for sale are left out.

The button uses the Site URL in Pages, Site Settings, so check that it is your real address. See Core - Set Up Your Page Site Settings. The email is sent with the same email setup as your order emails. See Account Email and Deliverability.

When no email is sent

• The shopper has bought one of the items since. Paying closes the saved cart straight away.
• They used the stop link in an earlier reminder.
• They are unsubscribed from your newsletters. See Managing Email Optins.
• The cart was last touched more than 3 days ago. This stops a long gap in the schedule, or switching the feature on later, from sending reminders about old carts.
• None of the products in the cart are for sale any more.
• The reminders are switched off in Shop Settings.

If an email cannot be sent, for example because your email setup has a problem, the cart stays open and the next run tries again.

Stopping reminders

The link at the bottom of every email opens a page that asks the shopper to confirm. Opening the link alone changes nothing, so an email scanner cannot switch it off by accident. Once they confirm, that email address never gets a cart reminder again. Many email apps also show their own unsubscribe button, which does the same thing. Stopping cart reminders does not touch order emails or newsletters.

Settings

Go to Shop, Shop Settings, Cart Reminder Emails. See Core - Set Up Your Shop Settings.

• Send cart reminder emails: off by default. Tick it to start sending reminders. Untick it to stop them: nothing is saved while it is off, and the next scheduled run removes any carts already saved.
• Hours before the reminder: how long a cart sits untouched first. The default is 4.

Seeing saved carts

Go to Shop, Abandoned carts. The list is read only. Each row shows the email address, the cart total and one of these statuses:

• Open: saved, waiting for the wait time to pass.
• Reminder sent: the email has gone out. The list also shows when, and when the shopper used the button.
• Bought: the shopper paid, so no reminder is sent.
• Skipped: not emailed, for one of the reasons listed above.

Saved carts are removed after 90 days. A shopper who asked to stop reminders keeps a row with no items, so the request is remembered.

Self-hosted sites: schedule the job

The emails are sent by a command, so it has to run on a schedule. Every 15 minutes works well. Running it more often is safe, because a cart is only ever emailed once.

On a server with a virtual environment, add this line to cron:

*/15 * * * * cd /path/to/your/site && ./venv/bin/python manage.py send_abandoned_cart_emails

With Docker, schedule this command instead:

docker compose exec -T web python manage.py send_abandoned_cart_emails

Until the job is scheduled, carts are saved but no reminder is sent. If you are not sure how to add a scheduled job, ask your AI assistant to do it for you and give it the command above.

Try it yourself

1. In Shop Settings, tick Send cart reminder emails and set Hours before the reminder to 0.
2. In a private browser window, add a product to the cart, go to checkout and enter an email address you can read. Do not pay.
3. Run the command by hand, or wait for the next scheduled run.
4. Open the email in a different browser and click Go back to my cart. The items should be back in the cart.
5. Set the hours back to 4.

Privacy

You keep a copy of a shopper's cart together with their email address so that you can send this reminder. Check that your Privacy Policy says so. See Core - Managing Info Pages And Policies.