CartBay - Abandoned Cart Recovery for WooCommerce

Yes. CartBay requires WooCommerce 9.8 or higher and WordPress 6.6 or higher.

They solve different halves of the problem, and CartBay covers the half where most of the money is. WooCommerce's feature (an experimental option under WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features) acts on an order that already exists. A shopper has to fill in checkout, press Place Order, and then not pay — WooCommerce keeps that order as pending and, two hours later, sends one email linking back to the order's payment page. CartBay acts earlier, where the drop-off actually happens. Most shoppers never press Place Order at all: they reach checkout, start filling it in, and leave. No order is ever created, so there is nothing for WooCommerce's feature to act on. CartBay captures the email at that moment — with the shopper's explicit consent — and recovers the cart itself. What CartBay adds on top:

• Recovery before an order exists — the abandonment that never reaches Place Order.
• A three-email sequence with independently configurable delays, instead of a single email at a fixed two hours.
• Consent-first capture, with an unsubscribe link, a hashed suppression list, and WordPress's own privacy export and erase tools wired in.
• Real cart restore — the shopper's cart is rebuilt with variations, merged into whatever they have now, and clamped to current stock, rather than being sent to a payment page for one specific order.
• Secure, expiring restore links — hashed and valid for 48 hours, rather than a standard order-pay URL that does not expire.
• Coupons, including validity checks before sending so a dead code is never emailed. WooCommerce's feature has no coupon support at all.
• Reporting — captured, reminded and recovered carts, with recovered revenue attributed to the email that earned it.

No. While CartBay's capture is enabled, CartBay tells WooCommerce to stand down using the woocommerce_abandoned_cart_recovery_suppress filter that WooCommerce provides for this purpose, so one shopper never receives recovery mail from both systems. Note that WooCommerce's automatic sending is off by default in any case — it has to be enabled under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails > Abandoned cart recovery. CartBay's own session records are never picked up by WooCommerce's feature either, because they are not checkout orders. If you would rather run both, add this to your theme or a small plugin: add_filter( 'cartbay_suppress_woocommerce_recovery_email', '__return_false' ); Turning CartBay's capture off leaves WooCommerce's feature exactly as you configured it.

You do not need to. If you do turn it on, leave CartBay's capture enabled and CartBay will keep the two from overlapping. The one thing WooCommerce's feature adds that CartBay does not is a manual "send a recovery email" button on the order edit screen for a specific unpaid order.

Yes. CartBay natively supports both the classic checkout and the WooCommerce Block Checkout. On Block Checkout the consent field appears in the contact section as a WooCommerce additional checkout field.

Open WooCommerce > CartBay > Templates and click Edit in WooCommerce for the email you want to change. Each recovery email is a native WooCommerce email, so you can edit its subject, heading, preheader, body, button text, and additional content, and it automatically uses your store's WooCommerce email logo, colors, and footer - with the same preview and test-send tools as your other WooCommerce emails. Supported placeholders include {restore_url}, {coupon_code}, {coupon_expiry}, and {unsubscribe_url}.

No. CartBay strictly uses WooCommerce-native order storage and is fully compatible with WooCommerce HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage). There are no custom database tables.

CartBay Free lets you reference a coupon you created in WooCommerce > Marketing > Coupons and include it in your recovery emails as plain text for the shopper to enter at checkout. Automatically generated, unique, single-use expiring coupons that auto-apply at checkout are part of CartBay Pro.

Yes. Capture and recovery work normally. CartBay Free does not auto-apply coupons; any coupon code you configure is included in the recovery email as plain text for the shopper to enter at checkout.

Enable Test Mode in WooCommerce > CartBay > Settings, then use Trigger Test Flow in the Templates section to schedule a sample recovery email about 30 seconds out and preview the email and its restore link. Use Test Mode on staging or during controlled QA, and disable it for normal production monitoring.

No. The free plugin does not contact WPAnchorBay licensing services or any third-party API. CartBay sends recovery emails through your WordPress/WooCommerce mail setup and sends capture requests only to your own site's local REST API endpoint at /wp-json/cartbay/v1/capture.

CartBay hands recovery emails to WordPress and WooCommerce for delivery - it does not send email itself. If a send fails, the cause is almost always your site's mail configuration (no SMTP plugin, misconfigured SMTP credentials, or your host blocking PHP mail()), not CartBay. Use the built-in Send Test Email tool in the setup wizard or under WooCommerce > CartBay > Notifications to check your configuration, and see https://docs.wpanchorbay.com/cartbay/getting-started/email-delivery-setup/ for help setting up reliable delivery (SMTP/transactional email and SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records).

Sent means WordPress/WooCommerce accepted the email for delivery. It does not by itself guarantee inbox delivery - that still depends on your SMTP configuration, domain authentication, and the receiving mailbox.

When a shopper gives consent at checkout, CartBay stores the email address, a cart snapshot, the checkout source, timestamps, notification history, and recovery metadata in WooCommerce-native order records. Restore and unsubscribe tokens are stored only as SHA-256 hashes, never in raw form. This data stays on your WordPress site unless your mail provider processes outgoing recovery emails. You can enable Delete Data on Uninstall in Settings to remove CartBay data when the plugin is deleted.

Documentation is at https://docs.wpanchorbay.com/cartbay/. For questions, please use the plugin's support forum on WordPress.org.