Abandonment Timeout

The abandonment timeout controls how long a cart must be inactive before it is considered abandoned. This page explains how the timeout works, how the detection cron operates, and the lifecycle a cart goes through from creation to recovery.

Setting the Timeout

The Abandonment Timeout field is located on the Abandoned Cart settings tab under Abandonment Settings. It accepts a value in minutes, with a default of 60 minutes. The minimum allowed value is 1 minute.

This value determines how long a cart must sit idle (no updates to the cart contents or email) before the cron job marks it as abandoned and syncs it to Mautic.

Choosing a Timeout Value

The right timeout depends on your store and customer behavior. Here are some guidelines:

• 30 minutes – Aggressive. Good for stores with quick purchase cycles where customers are unlikely to return after half an hour.
• 60 minutes (default) – A balanced choice that works well for most stores. Gives customers enough time to complete checkout without triggering false abandonment.
• 120 minutes or more – Conservative. Useful for stores with high-value products where customers may take longer to decide.

Setting the timeout too low may result in carts being marked as abandoned while the customer is still shopping. Setting it too high delays your recovery emails, which reduces their effectiveness.

How Detection Works

The plugin registers a WordPress cron event called mautic_woo_process_abandoned_carts that runs every 15 minutes. Each time it fires, it performs the following steps:

1. Queries the wp_mautic_woo_abandoned_carts table for all carts with a status of active that have not been updated within the timeout window.
2. Checks the GDPR consent status. If the GDPR checkbox was shown and the customer did not consent, the cart is marked as abandoned but is not synced to Mautic.
3. For qualifying carts, the status is changed to abandoned and the cart data is synced to Mautic. The abandoned cart tag is applied to the contact, and the cart data, recovery URL, and coupon code (if enabled) are pushed to custom fields.
4. If a Mautic segment ID is configured, the contact is also added to that segment.
5. After a successful sync, the cart status is updated to synced and the Mautic contact ID is stored in the database.

Up to 50 carts are processed per cron run. If you have a large number of abandoned carts, it may take several cron cycles to process them all.

Cart Status Lifecycle

Each cart record moves through a series of statuses as it progresses:

• active – The cart was captured at checkout and is still within the timeout window. The customer may still be shopping or deciding.
• abandoned – The cart has been inactive longer than the timeout. It has been marked as abandoned by the cron job.
• synced – The abandoned cart data has been successfully pushed to Mautic. The contact now has cart data, a recovery URL, and tags in Mautic.
• recovered – The customer came back and completed a purchase. The plugin detected the matching email on a new order and marked the cart as recovered.

Automatic Cleanup

A separate daily cron event (mautic_woo_cleanup_old_carts) removes cart records that are older than 90 days and have a status of synced, recovered, or expired. This keeps your database table from growing indefinitely. The daily cleanup also trashes any expired recovery coupons.