In the realm of e-commerce, the term “cart” refers to the digital equivalent of a physical shopping cart you would use in a brick-and-mortar store. Essentially, an e-commerce cart, also known as a shopping cart or online cart, is a temporary storage area on an e-commerce website where customers can place products they intend to purchase.
The Functionality of an E-commerce Cart
The primary function of a cart is to hold selected items as a customer browses an online store. It allows shoppers to add, remove, and modify the quantities of products they are interested in buying before proceeding to the checkout process. Think of it as a virtual basket that accumulates all your desired purchases during a single online shopping session. Without a cart, customers would need to purchase each item individually, making the online shopping experience cumbersome and inefficient.
The Cart in the Customer Journey and Abandonment
The shopping cart plays a crucial role in the customer journey, acting as a bridge between browsing and making a purchase. It provides a summary of selected items, including prices and potentially shipping costs, allowing customers to review their order before finalizing the transaction.
However, not all items added to a cart result in a completed purchase. In e-commerce, an “abandoned cart” occurs when a customer adds products to their cart but leaves the website without completing the checkout process. This abandonment can happen for various reasons, such as unexpected shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, or simply a change of mind.
In platforms like PrestaShop, carts are automatically marked as abandoned after a period of customer inactivity. By default, PrestaShop sets this abandonment timeframe to 24 hours. This means if a customer adds items to their cart, and does not complete the purchase within 24 hours and has left the site, the cart is then considered abandoned within the system. It’s important to note that for PrestaShop to track and mark a cart as abandoned, the customer typically needs to have entered their email address at some point during the checkout flow.
While the initial configuration might suggest a shorter abandonment window in some discussions, the standard default in PrestaShop is indeed 24 hours, and unfortunately, directly changing this within the standard PrestaShop admin settings is not readily available. Modifications to this setting often require code customization or the use of third-party modules, highlighting a point where specific platform configurations can influence e-commerce operations.
Understanding what a cart is, and especially the concept of abandoned carts, is vital for e-commerce businesses. It provides insights into customer behavior and opportunities to optimize the online shopping experience and potentially recover lost sales from abandoned carts.
