You can display product suggestions to shoppers when their cart is empty.
This feature helps your shoppers discover items and encouraging them to start shopping.
How to Set Up Empty Cart Recommendations?
Step 1: Enable empty cart recommendation
In the Cartly Dashboard, navigate to Custom Cart → Upsell section → Empty cart recommendation
Click the Enable button to activate the feature.
Step 2: Choose a recommendation type
There are 4 types of recommendations you can choose:
Recently viewed – Shows products the customer has browsed before.
Specific collections – Recommends random products from collections you select. Use the search bar or click Browse to pick collections.
Specific products – Lets you hand-pick products to display. Use the search bar or click Browse to choose products.
Redirect to collections – Sends shoppers to a collection page instead of showing inline recommendations. Use the search bar or click Browse to select the collection.
Variant-level selection: When using Specific products, you can now select individual variants — not just the product as a whole. This also applies to the Upsell feature.
Step 3: Enable Smart recommendations (optional)
You can tick both options here:
Abandoned cart – Shows items from the customer's previously abandoned cart (available for all customers with stored data).
Recently purchased – Suggests items the customer has bought before (only for logged-in customers).
✨ Smart recommendations (when available)
If smart recommendations aren't available for a session, Cartly falls back to your selected standard recommendation type. Includes Abandoned cart and Recently purchased sub-options — see below.
Abandoned cart recommendations behavior: To avoid showing products the cart is already restoring automatically, abandoned cart recommendations only appear after 30 days from the last cart update.
Items are automatically hidden from the recommendation block when they are:
Added to cart (customer responded to the recommendation)
Purchased (goal achieved)
No longer available — out of stock or removed from the catalog
The entire recommendation block hides itself when all items from the abandoned cart have been processed, or when no items remain to show.
When multiple options are enabled, Cartly follows this display priority:
Recently purchased (logged-in customers)
Abandoned cart
Standard recommendation type
Step 4: Configure the Settings
Module type – Choose how recommendations are displayed: Block, Carousel, or Slider.
Card type – Choose the card layout: Horizontal or Vertical.
Max number of products to display – Maximum number of products you can display in the card drawer is 4.
Optionally, you can check Replace Add to cart button with View product button to link to the product page instead.
Recommendations title – Customize the heading shown above the recommendations (e.g., "Recommended for you").
Add to cart button – Customize the button label (e.g., "Add to cart").
Click Save.
Need Help?
If you have any questions, please contact our support team.
📩 Contact Support: Reach out to us via live chat or send an email to [email protected]