Business & growth
What is a shopping cart?
A shopping cart is the part of an online store that holds a customer's selected items, with quantities and running totals, until they choose to check out.
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Technical definition
Cart state is held against a session identifier or a logged-in account, which is what lets the selection survive navigation between pages and, when persisted, between visits. The cart calculates line totals, applies discount codes, and estimates tax and shipping before handing the order to checkout.
Cart implementations vary in where that state lives: browser storage, a server-side session, or the customer's account record. Persisting the cart to an account is what makes abandoned cart recovery possible, since the store then knows both what was left and who left it.
In plain terms
The basket. Things go in, the total updates, and nothing is charged until checkout.
On the web, the basket has to survive the customer wandering off to look at something else, which is why carts break in ways real baskets do not.
Why it matters
A large share of started orders are never finished, and the cart is where most of that happens. Two causes account for most of it, and both are fixable.
The first is surprise. A total that changes at the last step, through shipping or tax, reads as a bait and switch even when it is not. Show the full cost as early as you can. The second is a cart that forgets. A customer adds three items on a phone, gets interrupted, comes back an hour later, and finds an empty cart. Persisting the cart costs nothing and recovers orders that were already won once.
