Understanding WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery's Multilingual and Multi-Currency Limitations

If you run a multilingual or multi-currency WooCommerce store, you may have encountered issues where the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin doesn't behave as expected. This is a common point of confusion, as the plugin's core functionality is designed around a single language and currency. This article explains these known limitations, why they occur, and outlines potential workarounds based on community discussions.

The Core Problem: Lack of Native Integration

The WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin is not natively integrated with popular multilingual plugins like WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress. This fundamental lack of integration is the root cause of several related issues users experience.

Common Symptoms and Their Causes

1. Emails Sent in the Wrong Language

Problem: All recovery emails are sent in your site's default language, regardless of the language the customer used when abandoning their cart.

Why it Happens: The plugin uses a single, global email template. It does not track the customer's language session or dynamically select a corresponding translated template.

2. Incorrect or Default Checkout Links

Problem: The recovery email contains a checkout link that points to the default language's checkout page (e.g., /checkout/) instead of the customer's specific language page (e.g., /de/kasse/ or /fr/checkout/).

Why it Happens: The plugin captures and stores a generic checkout URL at the time of abandonment. It does not capture the permalink structure for the specific language the customer was using.

3. Currency Display Issues

Problem: When using a multi-currency plugin (like WOOCS), the abandoned cart email may display prices with the wrong currency symbol, often defaulting to the site's primary currency.

Why it Happens: The plugin lacks integration with currency switchers. It captures the cart total as a raw number but does not capture the active currency context from the customer's session.

4. Translation and Encoding Difficulties

Problem: Users report difficulties translating certain strings, like GDPR text or email column headers (Item, Name, Quantity), and issues with special/accented characters not displaying correctly.

Why it Happens: Some plugin strings may not be readily available in the standard WordPress translation files (.pot), making them hard to find with translation plugins. Encoding issues are often related to email sending configuration, not the plugin itself.

Available Workarounds and Solutions

Based on responses from the 'WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery' team in support forums, here are the most common suggestions and community-driven workarounds.

For Translating Strings (GDPR, Email Headers, etc.):

• The most frequently recommended solution is to use the Loco Translate plugin. This plugin can scan the Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin's files and allow you to find and translate strings that may not be visible to other translation plugins.

For Special Character Encoding:

• Ensure you are using a reliable SMTP plugin to send your WordPress emails. Proper email sending protocols can often resolve character encoding problems.

For RTL Language Support (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic):

• The plugin's email templates do not automatically switch to RTL (Right-to-Left) direction. To achieve this, you will need to add custom CSS to your email template to force the RTL direction for the text.

For Multi-Currency Price Display:

• There is no direct fix. As a drastic workaround, some users have requested a way to remove prices from the abandonment emails entirely to avoid showing incorrect information. However, this functionality is not built into the plugin.

Official Stance and Future Development

Analysis of support threads indicates that the development team is aware of these high-demand features. They have stated they are in contact with the teams behind WPML and other plugins and have plans to add multilingual and multi-currency support to their development queue. However, there is no public timeline for when these integrations might be released.

Conclusion

The limitations with multilingual and multi-currency sites are a known constraint of the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin's current design. While workarounds like Loco Translate can solve some translation issues, core problems like language-specific emails and checkout links require native integration that is not yet available. Users requiring these specific features may need to evaluate alternative plugins that offer built-in support for multilingual and multi-currency setups.