All this while we have been mentioning about abandoned cart reminder emails which are sent to the customer upon cart abandonment. This is the most integral part of the Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin as this mechanism helps retrieve lost customers and in turn increase the overall business revenue. Since this plays a vital role in boosting online sales, we have introduced an added functionality to enhance the experience of sending reminder emails for abandoned carts. It is called WP-Cron job which provides resolution to the issue of abandoned cart reminder emails not getting sent automatically in Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin?

So let us first understand this terminology ‘WP-Cron’?

CRON is actually the name of a command which is used to schedule a future event to happen at a specific time. WordPress uses a file called wp-cron.php as a virtual cron job, or scheduled task in order to automate things like publishing scheduled posts, checking for plugin or theme updates, sending email notifications and more.

By default WordPress is setup to call wp-cron.php everytime someone visits your WordPress website when a scheduled task is present, to basically ask “is it time to do anything yet?”.

Now let’s talk about how WP-Cron works?

As we know, WP-Cron is primarily used to send abandoned cart reminder emails automatically to the concerned customer which means there is a regular check every time any cart gets abandoned. Every time WordPress goes to work, it checks to see if there are any jobs that need to leverage WP-Cron. Thus it implements a secret parameter and ensures that cron jobs are only executed when this parameter is existing. This way WP-Cron works to schedule events like publishing posts, checking for updates, sending email notifications etc to happen at a specific time depending on the parameters set.

Let us now get to know how to check if WP-Cron is enabled or disabled for the site?

Firstly, you need to go to the root directory of your WordPress site setup for checking if WP-Cron is disabled or not. If Wp-Cron job is disabled then abandoned cart reminder email will not go and if it is not disabled then abandoned cart reminder emails will be sent automatically. Root directory is nothing but a WordPress folder on your server, so once you reached to that path you will find WP-Config.php & all the files & WP-content along with all the other folders.

You now need to open the WP-Config.php file and check whether the constant “define (‘DISABLE_WP_CRON‘, true)” is defined to ‘true’, then abandoned cart reminder emails will not be sent automatically to the customers. Therefore if the constant as mentioned above is set to ‘false’ or the constant itself is not defined then the abandoned cart reminder emails will get sent automatically using WP-Cron job.

Note – If you check this constant in the file and its set to ‘true‘ then you needs to first make it ‘false’ in order to ensure sending of automatic reminder emails.

Alternate method if reminder emails do not get sent automatically:

If the constant in the file is set to “define (‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, false)” or it is not defined then ideally abandoned cart reminder emails get sent automatically. But at times there can be instances when for any reason the abandoned cart reminder emails do not get sent automatically to the customers. This is because of some settings in the server that restricts sending automatic reminder emails. Then there is an alternative method for resolving this issue for which you have to define a constant “define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true)” in the WP-Config.php file.

Now, let us check how does constant “define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true)” works?

This constant uses a redirection approach which makes the user’s browser get a redirect when the cron needs to run. This means customers can come back to the site immediately while cron continues to run in the connection they just dropped.

Conclusion

New and added feature to the existing functionality is what we always strive for. Thus it makes Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin best in the market for merchants struggling to achieve satisfactory results with online sales.

So why Wait and Watch. Act Fast!!!