Where to see abandoned carts in WooCommerce
WooCommerce keeps a guest's cart in a session, by default for 48 hours, and then forgets it. For that whole time you will not see it in the admin, because there is simply no screen with a list of carts.
What you do see are orders that got stuck before payment. When a customer picks an online payment method, clicks the order button and does not pay, WooCommerce > Orders shows an entry with the status “Pending payment”. A payment that was declined or ended in an error gets the status “Failed”. If your checkout page is built from blocks, you also get temporary drafts, which the store creates before the order is submitted and shows only in the “Draft” tab of the orders list.
Be careful, because these statuses change on their own. The “Hold stock (minutes)” option in WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory cancels unpaid orders once the limit passes, so some abandonments end up under “Cancelled”. In the Accounts & privacy tab you can also tell the store to move unpaid and failed orders to the trash after a set time, and then you will be comparing a full month with one where the trash ate half of the data.
Cart plugins and the email from version 11.0
A customer who left before the checkout form leaves no trace in the admin. You will only see them through a plugin that saves carts, such as Cart Reports for WooCommerce from the official Marketplace, which has a WooCommerce > Carts screen and a separate status for abandoned ones. There is also the paid AutomateWoo from the Woo team (USD 159 a year on the Marketplace page, as of October 2026), which treats a cart as abandoned after 15 minutes of inactivity and can send a series of reminders. Free equivalents from wordpress.org include Cart Abandonment Recovery for WooCommerce and Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce.
With guests, every one of them hits the same wall. There is no email address until the customer types it into the form.
Version 11.0, released on 4 August 2026, added an experimental feature called “Abandoned cart recovery”, which you switch on in WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features. It sends one email per unpaid order, either by hand from the order actions or, if you tick automatic sending, after two hours in the “Pending payment” status. Do not plan a campaign on it. Version 11.2, which WooCommerce scheduled for the week of 6 October 2026, removes the feature, and the database update cancels scheduled reminders and deletes the list of unsubscribed addresses. If you switched it on, after the update the store will no longer remember who opted out of those emails.
Test a purchase as a guest and as a logged-in customer
The admin tells you how many people dropped off. Why they did, you will only see when you buy something yourself, first as a guest in a private window on your phone, then on a customer account.
Start with WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & privacy. If “Allow customers to place orders without an account” is unticked, every new customer has to create an account before paying. Nobody wants to invent a password to spend PLN 39. Keep mandatory accounts for subscriptions, since WooCommerce requires them there anyway, and let everyone else create an account after the order is placed, which you set in the same tab.
During the test, watch four things.
- The step where you see the full amount including delivery.
- The order status in the admin after you abandon payment on the gateway page and return to the store with the browser button.
- Getting back to the interrupted order without placing it from scratch.
- Every enabled payment method, including the one you never use yourself, because you will be the last to hear that it broke.
Shipping cost and payment errors
The shipping cost settings live in WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping settings, in the “Calculations” section. The one that matters most there is “Enable the shipping calculator on the cart page”, which lets the customer work out the parcel cost before the form. The second option, “Hide shipping costs until an address is entered”, hides the cost until a full address is given. With flat rates for the whole of Poland it gains you nothing, because the customer learns the cost anyway, only at the very end, once the address and phone number are already typed in.
Payment methods are in the Payments tab. Go through the “Failed” orders from the last month and see which method they pile up under. If most of them fail on one gateway, start with its configuration and the notes in those orders, and think about emails later, because a reminder sends the customer back to a payment that has already failed once.
Consent for the reminder and a first email with no discount
An email that encourages someone to finish a purchase is easy to classify as commercial information, and for that Article 398 of the Polish Electronic Communications Law requires prior consent. The provision allows consent given by supplying an address precisely in order to receive such messages, and the customer gave you the address in the order form to get a confirmation and a parcel. GDPR is assessed separately.
AutomateWoo has an opt-in mode in which the customer ticks consent on the checkout page, among other places, and Cart Abandonment Recovery for WooCommerce lets you add a consent field to the form. Plugins like these can save an address before the customer places the order (in AutomateWoo, once that option is on), so describe it in your privacy policy.
Send the first email without a code. If you give 10 percent right away, regular customers may learn to leave a cart and wait for a code. Then buy something after the first email and check that the follow-ups stopped, and finally unsubscribe from the list and see whether the messages stopped arriving.
Where a chat helps before the cart is abandoned
The email arrives after the customer has already left. Some people leave earlier because nobody answered whether a filter fits their air purifier or whether the parcel will arrive before Friday. Add answers like that to product pages and the delivery page first.
A chat catches those questions while the customer is still on the site. CartBot on WooCommerce looks for answers in your catalogue and the store's knowledge base, shows the product with a photo and price, and its “Add to cart” button puts it into the real WooCommerce cart without leaving the page. It does not send abandoned cart emails and it will not fix a broken gateway.
How to count what you recovered
WooCommerce has built-in order attribution, enabled by default in the version 11.1 code, and you can check it in WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features under “Order attribution”. The orders list then shows an “Origin” column, so once you add UTM parameters to the links in your reminders, you can tell orders that came from the email at a glance.
There is one catch. Attribution gives all the credit to the last click and does not follow a customer across sessions. Someone asks the chat on Tuesday and buys on Thursday from a link in the email. The email gets the credit. A chat with its own sales report can count that same order on its side, so do not add those two numbers together.
Judge a change over comparable periods with similar traffic, using the number of orders that never reached payment, and remember that these numbers will not show the people who never got to the checkout at all. Let us check which questions block purchases in your WooCommerce store. Write to us and we will show you on your own catalogue before you pay anything.