Magento Shopping Cart: How to Add and Manage It on Your eCommerce Website

There are many things you can configure in your store when using expert Magento development services. But for beginners, certain setups become the first point of interaction with the eCommerce platform. Those who start their path of exploring its inner workings can stumble into how to set up the Magento shopping cart.

Magento Shopping Cart Overview

A Magento shopping cart features extensive functionality that transforms the user experience into a complete and straightforward process. Each customer can overview the contents of their own cart:

• Check listed items, price, and quantity;
• Calculate order total;
• Apply discount coupons;
• Estimate shipping and tax.

Users can also click on the Continue Shopping button to abandon their cart or choose Proceed to Checkout to place their order.

The customers won’t notice anything special about adding products, purchasing or abandoning a shopping cart. But on the store owner’s end, much depends on understanding its capabilities and translating them into business advantages.

How to Add a Shopping Cart to your Website on Magento

Developers can distinguish between two user types: Guests and Logged-in customers.

Taking this into account, there are a few simple steps to create an empty Magento shopping cart.

For guests:

A store admin generates a guest user’s cart ID through mutation and responds with a unique shopping cart identifier.

If the guest later logs in as an existing customer, Magento shopping cart rules require the following mutation to bring together the contents of the two carts:

For logged-in customers:

With guest users, the system previously generated a unique shopping identification. But to complete the Magento shopping cart integration for logged-in customers, developers should use the authorization token:

For simplicity’s sake, Magento’s official docs recommend copying the value of the unique ID, which will be further used in the setup.

This subsequent step is to start adding products to the cart. Magento supports virtually all types of products necessary for a satisfying shopping experience:

• Bundle products;
• Customizable product options;
• Configurable products;
• Downloadable products;
• Simple and grouped products;
• Virtual items.

Developers identify the product to be added by its SKU, which they can find in the admin panel:

Let’s add an item named “Bolo Sport Watch” from the default Firebearstudio default theme.

The response stores all simple items listed in the cart. 

Now that we’ve figured out how to create a shopping cart on your website and add products, let's see how admins can make adjustments in the admin panel. For example, before the shopping cart is labeled as an order, store admins can modify its contents in the following ways:

1. My Cart link. Store admins can set the cart link display by showcasing the number of different products in the shopping cart or the total number of all products at the top of the product page.
2. Mini Cart. This option lets admins activate/disable the display of the mini carton online store pages.
3. Quote lifetime. Store admins can define how many days a quoted price remains valid for shoppers.
4. Minimum order quantity and amount. The admin panel allows for setting the lowest quantity and amount bars for each order.
5. Redirect to Cart. This field helps to choose between the two options:
   -the cart appears when a user adds a product to the cart;
   -the cart appears when a user navigates to that section on the website.
6. Thumbnails. Store admins can select the image for product variations.

Apart from cart configuration, store admins can launch an assisted shopping session in Magento's Adobe Commerce edition. Here’s what the admin is required to do to get it started:

1. Navigate to the ‘Customers’ tab and click the ‘All Customers’ button.
2. Find the relevant customer record and open it in edit mode.
3. Open the Customer profile and check its status. If this user is online, go to the next point.
4. Press Manage Shopping Cart in the top bar.
5. Launch an Assisted Shopping Session:
   - add products to cart, modify their quantity, switch product options;
   - transfer products to cart from Wish List, Comparison List, Recently Viewed Products, Last Ordered Items;
   - apply valid Coupon codes;
   - modify the number of products as needed.
6. Create a new order.
7. Submit shipping and billing information.
8. Submit a new order.

Setting up a Shopping cart to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Magento contains efficient marketing features that each store owner can set up. One of them is configuring Magento persistent shopping cart. This feature allows leaving products in a carriage when a customer doesn’t complete the order and abandons your online store.

It takes the following steps to enable this option:

1. Navigate to the Stores button in the admin panel and click on the Configuration menu.
2. Open the Customers section and pick Persistent Shopping Cart.
3. Next, choose Yes in the Enable Persistence field.
4. Configure the Persistence Lifetime field. You can use the default value or set the desired one in seconds.
5. Set Yes in the Remember me field. This optional setting enables saving customers’ login details for a certain period of time. You can choose No to disable this option.
6. Choose No in the Clear Persistence on Sign Out field. This will help you preserve all shopping cart information.
7. Finally, click on the Persist Shopping cart option. Pick Yes to restore all customers’ shopping carts upon each shopping session.

Now, when users sign out of your store without completing an order, they can get back and find previously added products in their cart.

Conclusion

Online shopping carts present a time-efficient way to buy and sell products online. Luckily, it's easy to add and manage a Magento shopping cart even if you're not experienced with the technical aspects of eCom website development. But, on the other hand, an impressive set of Magento shopping cart features helps enhance the shopping experience and increase the number of sales.

Hopefully, with our guide on how to add a shopping cart to your website built on Magento, you will be able to unlock the full potential of this robust eCommerce platform. Contact our expert development team if you have issues following our step-by-step tutorial or explore more of Magento cart functionality.