Question

How could we alert a magento site admin about each abandoned cart immediately after it is abandoned?

Is it a default feature in Magento EE?

Answer 1

No it is not a default feature in Magento EE.

You ask how a site admin could be alerted of an event that is somewhat of a grey area.

Assuming that an abandon cart is defined by the following criteria (which in fact is not the definition but may be applicable to you)

• A registered user (ignore guest users for sake of sanity here) has products in cart.
• This user does not complete the checkout and leaves the store-front
• A period of time goes by (eg 1 day) with no adjustments on the cart items

Assuming this situation is your abandoned cart scenario i could suggest the following :

1.) I would use the Magento Quote Object (this is the object that is converted to an order after a successful checkout.)

looking at the quote object there already seems like there are enough fields to be able to monitor when the quote was created, when it was updated, when it was converted and whether it was converted or not. If the object does not contain the data fields you need there is no reason why you could not extend it. See a sample snapshot :

My (naive) suggestion would be to set up a scheduled job, to run at the same frequency at which you define your “abandoned cart” scenairio (or any frequency for that matter).

The job could do something like the following :

1.) Instantiate a collection of quotes.
2.) Filter out quote’s that have been converted
3.) Filter out quote’s that have been created recently (less than the critria above)
4.) Filter out quote’s that have been modified within the same time-frame criteria

at this point you should have a list of all quote’s that have been created, perhaps been updated but not converted for the last 24hours (depending on your criteria of course).

If you get to this point, well then the rest is straight forward.

Extract the information you need from the quotes (id’s names, numbers, emails etc), compile your report and email to the administrator.

it the best idea i can think of for now! i have not done this in practice…

Ofcourse you can set-up funnels and goals with Google Analytic to give you extensive information on your customers, including abandoned carts, but that doesn’t answer your question.