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I'm looking for a third-party service to integrate with my custom shopping cart to automatically send emails to people that leave the checkout before finishing; aka, abandoning their cart. Basically, anytime someone leaves the site and we have their email address, we'd like to send them an email enticing them to come back to the site.

That's the basics of it, any additional functionality would be great. Suggesting other products, offering some kind of special offer, etc.

I'm just looking for any services that offer this rough description.

Thanks

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    Have you given thought to why they abandon? One reason I buy stuff and then abandon it is because it's the only way for finding out shipping charges. If the sites where I do that had the information easily available I wouldn't need to use the cart. What you could do initially is ask them why they abandoned, rather than trying to sell, and eliminate any shortcomings like I described.
    – paulmorriss
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:29
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    +1 paulmorriss - @Dan Smith - This could be implemented properly, but there should be a delay before sending the email. There's a high potential to annoy your customers with this type of thing.
    – JMC
    Jun 10, 2011 at 17:30
  • This has happened to me once, where I abandoned a shopping cart because I couldn't make up my mind as to whether or not to purchase. I was REALLY annoyed when they emailed me and it was definitely a factor in choosing ANOTHER site at which I made the eventual purchase.
    – Melanie Palen
    Aug 10, 2011 at 13:11

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RevenueExpect ($50/month) claims to offer shopping cart abandonment emails via MailChimp with a five-minute setup time. (Haven't used it myself.)

If you'd prefer not to pay a monthly fee for the service, it wouldn't be too tricky to build a cart abandonment solution yourself. For example, using the MailChimp API:

  1. Add the email address of any logged in user who adds something to their cart to a MailChimp list called "abandoned cart".
  2. When the user checks out successfully, delete their name from that list.
  3. Set up an autoresponder to email anyone left on the list one hour after they were added to it.
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