Abandoned Cart Emails - where to get the data

I had an Abandoned Cart Email extension installed that caused checkout problems. It took me a bit to realize the problems were because of the extension, and it was because it was executing ajax calls on the checkout page to store the customer information. In looking around, it seems like all the abandon cart email extensions do this. Why isn't the customer email and products added to cart pulled from the missing orders instead?

I would guess that they're doing it so they can capture abandoned carts *before* the customer gets to the final Confirm step of checkout. That's the step that creates the order in OpenCart, so it doesn't exist before then. If someone say got to the shipping step of checkout and abandoned their order, there would be no record of it. It would generally be a good idea to capture the data before the order is created, so I'm sure that's why the extensions work that way.

That may be different if your store uses a quick checkout. If it does, then it may capture the order data sooner. In that case, it may be fine to disable the ajax callback of the extension, but you should check with both the quick checkout developer and extension developer to be sure.

However, an ajax callback in the middle of checkout should be fine (the checkout itself does numerous ajax calls to the server). If there are issues there I would discuss it with the extension developer, and get them to fix it. If they refuse, then find a better developer. If you've tried multiple extensions and none of them work for the ajax callbacks, there may be a server issue going on. In that case, you should consider hiring someone to look at your installation, to see if they can figure out the cause.

If you need to find a developer, you can post a request in the OpenCart "Commercial Support" forum, which is checked by a number of OpenCart developers. You can also try checking out the OpenCart "Partners" area.

Ah, yeah, I use one page checkout and forgot some people use steps. The less ajax calls the better on the checkout. Thanks for the feedback.