Feature: Creating Cart Service, Cart Events, Save For Later functionality, Adding Filament Views for viewing abandoned carts

docs/recovery-strategies.md

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+# Cart/Checkout Recovery Strategies — Design Notes
+
+**Status: open design discussion, not scoped or built.** This is a record of the
+reasoning behind an eventual "Recovery Sequences" feature, kept so the discussion doesn't
+have to be re-derived from scratch later. Nothing in this document is implemented.
+
+See `docs/cart.md` for what's actually built today (the four-state cart classification,
+`CartAbandoned`/`CheckoutAbandoned` events, `DetectAbandonedCarts`).
+
+---
+
+## Why Abandoned Cart and Abandoned Checkout need different strategies
+
+Established in `docs/cart.md`: Abandoned Cart (no order ever started) is a weak purchase-intent
+signal and often unreachable (no identity for a true guest). Abandoned Checkout (a draft order
+exists, `placed_at IS NULL`) is a strong intent signal and usually reachable, since checkout
+typically captures an email/address even for a guest.
+
+That difference in intent and reachability drives genuinely different marketing strategy, not
+just a different admin filter:
+
+### Abandoned Cart strategy — re-engagement, not completion
+
+- **On-site retargeting first** (exit-intent popups, "still thinking it over?" banners on
+  return visits) — often the only viable channel, since email may not exist yet.
+- **Ad platform retargeting** (Meta/Google dynamic remarketing) is the dominant channel here
+  specifically because it works off a browser/device signal, not an email address — the one
+  thing reliably available for an anonymous cart.
+- **Soft messaging** ("did you forget something?") rather than urgency-driven — intent is
+  weak, so aggressive discounting is often poor ROI: it trains browsers who were never close
+  to buying to expect a coupon.
+- **Longer, gentler cadence** — a single reminder around 24h, maybe a second a few days out,
+  sometimes trigger-based (a price drop, back-in-stock) rather than a fixed schedule.
+
+### Abandoned Checkout strategy — completion, not re-engagement
+
+- **Speed matters most.** This is where the classic 1h/24h/72h recovery-email cadence lives —
+  conversion drops sharply with delay, since the shopper is often still in a "was about to
+  buy" mental state within the first hour.
+- **Direct, urgency-framed messaging** ("complete your order"), sometimes showing cart
+  contents/total, occasionally a countdown or limited-time incentive on later touches.
+- **Discount escalation pays off here** — a small incentive (free shipping, 10% off) on the
+  2nd/3rd touch is standard, because it's nudging someone who already decided to buy past
+  whatever blocked them (price shock, a broken payment step, indecision on shipping cost) —
+  not manufacturing demand from nothing.
+- **SMS is more viable** — checkout often captures a phone number, and the higher intent
+  justifies a more direct channel than for cart-stage.
+
+---
+
+## The broader strategy space (beyond cadence + discount)
+
+Raised as context for how far a "Recovery Sequence" feature might eventually need to flex,
+without committing to building any of it yet:
+
+**Message-content strategies**
+- Social proof ("X people have this in their cart," reviews shown in the reminder)
+- Scarcity/urgency framing (low-stock count, countdown timer on an offer)
+- Personalized alternatives — a cheaper or complementary item instead of just re-showing the
+  abandoned one, useful when the likely blocker was price
+
+**Channel strategies**
+- Email (the baseline; nothing built yet — see `docs/cart.md`'s "Recovery Sequences" section)
+- SMS — checkout-stage specifically, opt-in required
+- Push notifications — not relevant yet given this project's storefront maturity, noted for
+  completeness
+- On-site remarketing (banner/modal on the shopper's next visit) — doesn't require email at
+  all, arguably the highest-value channel for Abandoned Cart specifically
+- Ad platform sync (pushing abandoned-cart product data to a custom audience for paid retargeting)
+
+**Escalation/segmentation strategies**
+- Value-based branching — a high-value abandoned checkout might skip straight to a bigger
+  incentive rather than waiting through a full ladder
+- Repeat-abandoner suppression — a customer who's abandoned 3+ times without ever completing
+  either stops receiving emails (fatigue/spam risk) or gets a different tactic (e.g. a "what
+  stopped you?" survey) instead of another discount
+- New vs. returning customer branching — a first-time visitor's abandoned cart might warrant
+  "welcome discount" framing instead of a generic recovery email, since the blocker was
+  likely trust/unfamiliarity rather than price
+
+**Timing refinement**
+- Time-of-day/timezone-aware sending (don't fire a touch at 3am local time even if the delay
+  technically elapsed)
+- Cart-content-triggered timing — a fast-moving/low-stock item might warrant an earlier, more
+  urgent first touch than a cart of always-in-stock staples
+
+---
+
+## First-pass feature shape (discussed, not finalized)
+
+An admin defines, independently per abandonment type (Abandoned Cart, Abandoned Checkout), an
+ordered sequence of **touches**. Each touch is three ideas:
+
+1. **How long to wait** since the abandonment began
+2. **What offer to attach**, optional — reusing whatever `Discount` already exists in the
+   system rather than inventing a new pricing concept
+3. **A label**, so staff can see what a touch represents in the admin UI
+
+The system continuously re-evaluates every abandoned cart/checkout against its sequence, and
+when a cart becomes due for the next touch it hasn't had yet, that becomes a signal — this
+feature's responsibility ends there. Actually sending anything (email, SMS, on-site banner) is
+explicitly out of scope for this feature; something else, not yet designed, would consume that
+signal.
+
+### What this requires that isn't built yet
+
+- **A fixed "abandonment began at" timestamp**, captured once and never re-derived — a
+  sequence needs to schedule touches from a stable starting point, not from `Cart::updated_at`,
+  which keeps moving every time the cart (or its own bookkeeping) is written to. This is the
+  same underlying issue as the known bug in `docs/cart.md`'s "Abandonment detection" section —
+  fixing that bug properly (freezing the abandonment moment) is very likely a prerequisite for
+  this feature, not a separate concern.
+- **Re-evaluation, not one-shot detection** — `DetectAbandonedCarts` today marks a cart
+  abandoned once and stops; a sequence needs a cart to be revisited on every scheduler run to
+  check "which touch, if any, is now due," for as long as it stays unrecovered.
+
+### Still undecided
+
+- **Which concern this belongs under.** Not `Cart` (it's not a cart-mechanics concern) —
+  candidates raised: a new `Recovery` concern, or `Marketing`. Not decided.
+- **How far the touch model needs to flex.** The three-idea shape above (delay, discount,
+  label) covers cadence + discount escalation cleanly, but doesn't yet accommodate channel
+  choice, value-based branching, or segment targeting from the broader strategy list above.
+  Whether those get folded into the touch model, layered on top some other way, or deliberately
+  left out of v1 is unresolved.
+- **Whether "recovery" is cart/checkout-specific at all**, or a more general "scheduled
+  customer touch based on a triggering condition" mechanism that cart/checkout abandonment
+  happens to be the first use case for.