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When an item is added to cart, it begins the online shop's order process. If the cart is abandoned at any point before the order is finished, the unfinished order will be placed in your store's "Not Completed" order status.
In an earlier article, we mentioned how not completed orders can be useful in seeing if there are possible issues on your store's checkout (i.e. shipping calculation, payment issues, etc) that may have prevented the order from being completed. This is still valid, but some merchants become overly concerned when they see many abandoned carts.
Most of the time, the store's not completed orders are nothing more than simple "window shopping" occurrences. These are situations where someone added an item to their cart and simply left. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with the cart's functions. It's simply people being indecisive and leaving before checkout. As online shoppers, we're all guilty of doing this at one point or another.
In other cases, the not completed order activity is the result of various marketing and indexing bots that are merely triggering the store's "Add to Cart" and "Proceed to Checkout" functions. This has the effect of inadvertently creating a not completed order. This too is normal ecommerce activity and nothing to be alarmed with. Furthermore, even though this type of activity usually results in many not completed orders in a short amount of time, rest assured that it cannot result in any compromise of your store's database and security due to our PCI compliance standards and CDN systems.
If you'd like, you can block these bots by employing Shift4Shop's IP security functions. However, please note that it can be very difficult to block bot activity 100% of the time.
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