Have you received email inviting you to complete your purchase?

Over the bank holiday weekend one of our customers emailed and asked me why he was receiving email from us inviting him to complete his purchase. The email says:

Dear.....

You recently visited our online store and we noticed that you didn't complete your order for the following items:

It then lists the items that are in the shopping basket but for which checkout has not been completed. Below this will be a coupon code and a link to take you directly to view your shopping basket to complete the check out process.

What are these emails for?

Our intention in sending these invitations are to act as reminder to you that there are goods you have spent time shopping for but not actually bought. Our system recognises these 'abandoned shopping sessions' and will automatically send a series of invitations/ reminders of which there are 3 in total. In each we provide a discount code to use towards payment for those goods. You can add more goods to the basket and the discount will be applied to everything on that order.

As well as serving as reminder prompts to you these emails are also tools businesses use to assist them in gaining finalised orders. After all, it is by fulfilling orders that companies such as ours can continue to exist. We want to be able to stay in business and to continue to offer you the great products and exceptional service we do and so employ the use of such tools in order to do this.

When are they issued?

The first of these invitations is sent 2 hours after you've left our website without completing the checkout process. It's particularly useful if during shopping session you've suddenly been called away and got side tracked by life in the middle of your shop!

If no action is taken a second invitation is sent one day afterwards. It's a handy reminder, especially if you were majorly distracted yesterday and had since then totally forgotten what you had been doing when you were called away! Are you on your last half bottle of e-liquid? Now is the time to order!

The third, final one is generated 2 days later and, after this, if no action is taken no further reminders are generated. The assumption being that you don't want these items at this time and aren't about to run out of critically important items. The products remain in your basket to be edited or purchased at a later date.

The discerning amongst you may have noticed that within each of these emails is a different discount code offering reductions on the finalised purchase. We offer these of course as incentives to finish your order. After all it makes good business sense for us if we encourage you to complete your order.

What to do if you want to stop receiving these invitations?

Sometimes our customers have more than one account with us with different email addresses. They may have begin their shop logged in on one email address and then complete and purchase using another account. Then of course the email is sent to the email address with the unfinished order. This is what happened with the customer who had emailed me over the weekend. He wasn't happy to be receiving these emails after having made his order.

These invitations are sent with the intention of being useful to you but we understand that you may not wish to receive them, perhaps find them annoying or may even find them intrusive. We certainly would not wish to be and so, here are 3 different ways for you to put a stop to these. 

You can either:

Complete the shop:

You can complete the purchase right away clicking the link provided in the email. You can edit quantities or add additional shopping,  then simply proceed onwards to the checkout buying all of the items in your basket. Using the discount code provided in the email will discount all goods in the order.

Edit/Empty the basket:

Alternatively, click the same complete order link and edit the items, removing them if they're not required. You'll see there is an 'x' remove item link on the right hand side next to the quantity. Once your basket is empty the system knows not to continue sending reminders/invitations.

With both of these options, should you 'abandon' shopping on future occasions you will receive reminders again in the same way. However if you want to stop them altogether there is a simply way to halt them entirely.

Stop the system sending all reminder/invitations:

At the bottom of the email there is another link you can click to stop receiving emails like this in future. If you select this option we will never send invitation/reminder emails to you again but nor will you then benefit from the extra discount codes they contain.

I sincerely hope this is useful and will help you to understand why we use these tools to aid our business and to serve as reminders and incentives to you our valued customer.