Recover abandoned Teachable checkouts in AWeber

The signal is real, on three separate Teachable pages

Teachable publishes an event calledAbandonedOrder.created in its webhook documentation.SourceZapier's Teachable app exposes the same thing as a trigger namedAbandoned Cart.SourceAnd Teachable's own pricing page lists Upsells & cart recovery as an included feature bullet on Starter, Builder and Growth, meaning Teachable already sends its own recovery emails without any of this.Source

So the signal exists, and Teachable already acts on it by default. The question this page answers is whether it is worth routing that signal into AWeber instead, so the recovery sits beside the rest of your buyer data rather than living only inside Teachable.

Why the App Hub route does not cover this

The Teachable to AWeber App Hub integration only fires on five named events, and abandoning a checkout is not one of them: New sign-up, New sale, New enrollment, Course completed, and Subscription canceled.SourceBuying is the opposite of abandoning, so nothing about that integration will ever fire for someone who did not complete checkout. Something else has to sit in the middle.

Decide whether this is worth building

• Do you have enough abandons for this to matter?A handful of sales a month usually means a handful of abandons. A recovery sequence built on a Zapier subscription to rescue two carts is a hobby, not a growth lever. Check your last 90 days first.
• Is Teachable's own tool already enough? It is bundled at no extra cost on every current paid plan and needs no Zapier account. Its downside is the one that likely brought you to this corridor: it does not share a record with the rest of your list, so you cannot branch it against anything else you know about the person.
• Is this person actually on your marketing list?Someone who typed an email into a checkout and left has not necessarily agreed to your weekly newsletter. Design the recovery so it does not silently merge them into your main list.

The recipe: Teachable Abandoned Cart, Zapier, AWeber tag, AWeber workflow

Part 1, in AWeber. Create two tags per course before you build anything else: abandoned-course-nameand purchased-course-name. The second one is how you stop chasing someone who came back and bought ten minutes later, which is the most common way these sequences embarrass people.

Part 2, the catching Zap. Trigger: Teachable "Abandoned Cart." Action: AWeber "Create Subscriber," with the abandoner's email mapped in and theabandoned-course-name tag set on the Tags field Zapier exposes for that action.Source

Read this before you build it. Teachable's Transactions API returns only a user ID and a pricing plan ID, no email address and no product name.SourceWe could not find a published schema for the abandoned-cart payload specifically. When you run Zapier's test step, look at the sample record and check for an email address field. If it is missing, this route needs a lookup step you build yourself, and if the payload does not name the course either, build one Zap per course filtered on that course's plan ID rather than guessing which cart was whose.

Part 3, the cancel Zap. Trigger: Teachable "New Sale," documented as firing on self-enrollment, free or paid, not on one an admin adds.SourceAction: AWeber "Create Subscriber" or "Update Subscriber," setting the purchased-course-name tag. You want this Zap for ordinary post-purchase tagging anyway, so it doubles as the recovery kill switch.

Part 4, the AWeber workflow. Starter: someone is tagged abandoned-course-name. AWeber's own documentation on this starter confirms it fires whenever that exact tag lands on a subscriber, though only for tags applied after the workflow is published, not retroactively.Source

Then, in order: a Wait step (AWeber's Wait action supports minutes, hours, days, weeks or months, so a same-day first touch is genuinely possible, not just a next-day one)Source, a check for the purchased-course-name tag that exits anyone who already bought, the recovery emails themselves, another check after each one, and a final step that removes theabandoned-course-name tag so the same person abandoning again next month can trigger the workflow a second time.

What the recovery emails should say

This part is judgment, not documentation. Three emails is a reasonable shape: one a few hours later that assumes a technical problem rather than a decision, one a day or two later that answers the objection you actually hear from buyers, and one a few days later with a real reason to decide now, a closing date or an expiring bonus that genuinely exists, or a plain "here is the link if you come back" if it does not.

If you cannot get an email address on the payload

Then the honest answer is to use Teachable's own cart recovery and not fight it. Teachable owns the checkout session, so it can email that person itself, on every current paid plan, at no extra cost. You lose the shared subscriber record. You keep the recovered sale, which is the money. Run the AWeber half of this corridor on the thing AWeber is actually wired for through the App Hub: purchases.

Summary