What Is a Cart Page? The Step Before Checkout

What Shoppers Do on the Cart Page

This is where a shopper looks over the order before paying. They check the items and the subtotal, and fix a quantity if they need to. Shipping and taxes usually come later, at the checkout step.

The page isn't the shopping cart itself. The cart is the list of items, and this page is one place to see it.

Your theme controls the cart page, so you can change it in the theme editor. Checkout is a separate step that Shopify runs. That's where shoppers enter their address and payment details, not the cart page.

Cart Page, Cart Drawer or No Cart at All

A cart drawer shows the same cart in a panel that slides over the page, so the shopper stays where they were. Dawn, Shopify's free theme, has a cart type setting with three options: drawer, page or popup. Even with the drawer turned on, yourstore.com/cart still loads.

Some orders skip the cart completely. A Buy it now button on a product page sends shoppers straight to checkout.

Example: 1,000 Sessions at a Pet Supply Store

Across 958 Shopify stores in our data, about 8 in 100 sessions reached the cart, and 42% of those carts went on to checkout. You'll find more numbers in our Shopify cart abandonment statistics. Say a pet shop has those averages:

1,000 sessions come in.
About 80 of them reach the cart.
Roughly 34 of those 80 start checkout.
The other 46 or so go no further than the cart.

So more than half the carts stop here. And if the shop uses a drawer, some of those 80 people never load /cart at all.

Offers Shown on the Cart Page

People on the cart page have already picked something, so some stores put offers there. Our app, Growth Suite, can show a visitor's time-limited offer on this page, with an animated element that shows the savings and the time left. Their single-use code is already applied to the cart. Growth Suite only shows these offers to visitors it sees as less likely to buy.

If you're weighing product add-ons inside the cart, check our guide to cart drawer and in-cart upselling.

Not Every Buyer Sees Your Cart Page

It's easy to picture the cart page as a gate every buyer walks through. It isn't. Shoppers can check out from a drawer or tap Buy it now. Shopify's conversion report counts sessions that added to cart, not visits to /cart. So before you redesign the page, check how many shoppers actually see it.