Create a scheduled task to send out automatic email reminders to customer to come back and finish their order.

What does the email say?
Here's an example:

You can update the text of the email in admin > Email > Email Templates > Edit 18 Abandoned Cart Reminder. You can manually update the email in /admin/scheduled/act_abandoned_carts_reminder.cfm.

Who gets the email?
We need an email address to send an email. They also needs items in their cart. So generally anyone who's made it past the address screen will get an email.
When an email is sent the cart gets tagged as 'contacted'. No more abandoned cart emails will get sent for that cart.

How soon to send the email?
Every basket has a timestamp for when it was last updated. Some websites will send an abandoned cart email within an hour of an abandoned cart, some will wait 24 hrs. This is a marketing decision. Google the term 'abandoned cart emails' and you'll find a lot of discussion and guidance on the issue.

Hosting Permissions
This function creates a scheduled task on the Coldfusion server. Most hosting companies allow you to add scheduled tasks directly. If they don't, you can generally request they add it for you. Here's an example of what you want them to add:

The full URL is 'https://www.domainname.com/admin/scheduled/act_abandoned_carts_reminder.cfm?past=1440'. You need to add in your own domain name and change 'past=1440' to however many minutes old the cart should be before it gets an email reminder.

SETTINGS

• Past: How old should the basket be before you send them an email? Enter in minutes.
• Recur: How often should we run the email routine that checks if there's emails to be sent. Enter in minutes.

Example 1: I want to send an email 24 hours after the customer abandons their cart. Set Recur=60 and Past=1440 (24 hours). The server will check every hour to see if anyone qualifies for a reminder email.

Example 2: I want to send an email 24 hours after the customer abandons their cart but I only want it to happen once per day. When you update your settings, the start time begins when you submit the form. So if set Recur=1440 and Past=1440 and you submit the form at 10am, then everyday at 10am everyone who abandoned their cart 24 hour or more ago will get a reminder email.

Example 3: Recur=30 and Past=30, email reminders will go out every 30 minutes for anyone who abandoned their cart 30 minutes or more ago.