As 2019 draws to a close, it’s time for one last Commerce release. We’ve had a very busy month since the 2.15 release, and we’re excited to show you the results. This new release closes 40 issues thanks to the help of over 30 contributors!

Cart expiration

One powerful aspect of the Commerce architecture is that carts are stored as order entities, ready to be converted to a fully placed order with just a few field changes. However, customers often change their minds, leaving a site before completing (or even attempting) checkout. This can be a problem for high traffic websites where thousands of abandoned carts accumulate in the database in a short period of time.

Many sites attempt what’s called "abandoned cart recovery", notifying customers after a certain number of days using a module like Commerce Abandoned Carts. They might even offer a discount as an incentive to get the customer to come back. Whether you take that approach or not, it eventually makes sense to remove abandoned carts from the system.

In Drupal 7 this was the job of the Commerce Cart Expiration module. For Drupal 8, we’ve added this functionality to the core Commerce framework.