What Is a Shopping Cart? How Shopify Carts Work

A Cart Is a List, Not a Page

The shopping cart is the saved list itself. A cart page and a cart drawer are two ways to show it. Change a quantity in either one and you're changing the same cart. US stores mostly say "cart" and UK stores often say "basket." Fashion brands often pick "bag" instead.

It isn't the checkout either. Nothing's paid yet. Checkout comes next, where shoppers enter shipping and payment details.

How Shopify Remembers a Cart

If a shopper isn't logged in, Shopify ties their cart to the browser with a cookie (a small note the browser saves). Come back later in the same browser and the items are usually still there. Switch from phone to laptop, though, and the laptop cart starts empty.

Many themes update the cart without reloading the page. That's an AJAX cart.

Where Carts Get Left Behind

Most carts start with an add to cart click and end in an order or nothing. In our data from 958 Shopify stores, 58% of carts never started checkout, and 43% of checkout starters left before paying. Together, that's a cart abandonment rate of 76.04%. See our full Shopify cart abandonment data.

Example: A Week of Carts at a Coffee Roaster

Say a coffee roaster's store matches those averages and gets 200 carts in a week.

116 carts (58%) never reach checkout.
84 shoppers start checkout, and about 36 of them (43%) leave.
48 shoppers place an order.

That's 152 carts left behind, or 76% of 200. Shopify's Abandoned checkouts list can show up to 36 of them. The other 116 never reached checkout, so they aren't listed.

For the bigger gap, Shopify's conversion report counts sessions that added to cart and sessions that reached checkout. Your own numbers will differ from our averages.

Shoppers in the cart have already picked something, so many stores add a last nudge there, like a free shipping bar or an add-on. Not sure what to show? See our guide to cart drawer upsells on Shopify.

Myth: Items in a Cart Are Held for the Shopper

Lots of people think a full cart holds the stock. On Shopify, adding an item to a cart doesn't reserve it. Say two shoppers both have your last linen shirt in their carts. Whoever pays first gets it. If you track inventory and stop selling at zero, the other can't buy it. So a cart timer saying "items reserved for 10 minutes" isn't true unless something actually holds that stock.