Magento shopping cart is a key step in your checkout process, and unfortunately, the one where customers are very likely to drop off. Things like unexpected costs, confusing navigation or incorrect product images can cause many people to abandon the cart.
That's why it's crucial to understand and optimise your cart settings to avoid abandonment and increase sales in Magento.
In this guide, you'll discover the key features of the Magento shopping cart and how to set it up the "right" way. We'll also cover how you can manage and optimise your cart for the best user experience.
Benefits of Magento Shopping Cart
As we've already said, the shopping cart plays an important role in the customer's journey.
When configured properly, it can bring tons of benefits for you and your customers.
Benefits for merchants
Perhaps you haven't even thought about any benefits except sales here. However, the Magento shopping cart brings more than that.
- Increased sales: you can show related products in your cart based on the chosen ones, create and apply coupons, and use cart price rules to offer personalised discounts.
- Better customer insights: customers' interaction with your shopping cart gives you insights into what products they are interested in, allows you to track where people leave and find a way to remove the bottlenecks.
- Multiple marketing opportunities: shopping cart insights provide tons of opportunities for remarketing or advertising based on customers' behaviour in the cart.
Benefits for customers
The Magento shopping cart is an important bridge in converting store visitors into paying customers. So the goal is to make their interaction with it as smooth as possible.
A properly optimised car brings lots of benefits to your customers too.
- Faster decision: the less cluttered and complex your shopping cart is, the easier it is for customers to proceed to checkout without hesitation.
- Saved time: the persistent cart allows visitors to continue the purchasing process without the need to start from scratch. You save your customers' time.
- Personalised experience: gathering insights into items people purchased or viewed before allows you to show them more personalised offers.
Now that you know what benefit you're getting, let's configure your shopping cart.
How to Configure Magento Shopping Cart?
Since the shopping cart is directly related to the checkout, the configuration options are under Stores > Configuration > Sales > Checkout. Navigate there to configure the Magento shopping cart features.
1. Set up "My Cart" Link
The Magento shopping cart link ensures easy access to the cart. It is located in the upper-right corner of the website header, showing the number of products customers have added and reminding them that they haven't finished checkout yet.
Correspondingly, you can configure whether it displays the total number of items in the cart or the number of items in the cart, disregarding the quantity.
So, all you have to do is find the My Cart Link section under Stores > Configuration > Sales > Checkout and define how to Display Cart Summary.
Here are the options you can choose from:
- Display item quantities — display the total number of items in the cart along with the quantity of each product.
- Display number of items in cart — displays the number of items in the cart without the quantity of each product.
The choice depends on your business model. The Display item quantities option is better for bulk stores where customers purchase different units of the same product.
You should also consider choosing this option if you want to apply discounts for casual shoppers based on quantity.
The Display number of items in cart option is more common for regular stores, where customers can see the number of different products without the need to check quantities.
2. Set up "Mini Cart"
Once you click on the Magento shopping cart link, you trigger a mini cart. Same as the cart link, it is available on every catalogue page.
So, customers can quickly review what they've already added to the cart and change the quantities or delete the product from the cart if needed.
To set up a mini cart in Magento, you just need to configure three options in the Mini Cart section:
- Specify whether to enable or disable the mini cart in the Display Mini Cart field. If you go to Yes, a mini cart will appear on the right, showing you the current cart content.
- Enter the Number of Items to Display Scrollbar that defines how many items customers have to add before the scroll is enabled.
- Set the Maximum Number of recently added Items to Display in the mini cart, and don't forget to press the Save Config button.
Note: sometimes mini cart is not synchronised across multiple devices and browsers for registered customers. They just need to open the shopping cart page to view the items.
3. Set up "Redirect to Shopping Cart"
All information about the products added to the cart is already in the mini cart. Correspondingly, there is no strong need to redirect customers to the shopping cart page after they add any products to the cart. By default, the redirect is disabled.
You allow your customers to choose whether to go to the shopping cart page. This way, the checkout doesn't look forced.
However, you can choose a different scenario too. Go to the Shopping Cart section and enable or disable the After Adding a Product Redirect to Shopping Cart option.
4. Set up "Quote Lifetime"
Customers sometimes leave their shopping carts for too long but still come back to make a purchase later. Yet, the price of the products might change during that time.
Correspondingly, to specify for how many days the quoted price will be valid, fill out the Quote Lifetime (days) option in the Shopping Cart section.
5. Set up "Cart Thumbnails"
Thumbnails help your customers get an idea of what products they've already added to the cart. Usually, they match the product customers choose. However, when products have variations, thumbnails in the cart might not correspond to the added items causing confusion.
For configurable and grouped products, images match the product variation or the parent product image.
So you can set the Grouped and Configurable Product Images in the Shopping Cart section.
- Product Thumbnail Itself — uses the thumbnail of the product a customer adds to the cart.
- Parent Product Thumbnail— uses the thumbnail of a parent product.
6. Set up "Minimum Order Quantity"
If you want to encourage more purchases or just have a specific amount to be sold to certain customer groups, you can configure the Minimum Qty Allowed in Shopping Cart option.
Go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Inventory > Product Stock Options to set it up.
Then, according to your configuration, different groups of customers will see the quantity they need to select to add items to the cart.
Note: be careful to not overdo it, unless you have a reason to. People don't like being forced to purchase.
7. Set up "Minimum Order Amount"
Another Magento shopping cart feature that also encourages purchases is the minimum order amount. According to it, customers have to meet a certain subtotal to be able to checkout. Otherwise, the checkout button simply is not available.
Besides, you can also require orders shipped to multiple addresses to meet the minimum order amount per address.
8. Set up "Gift Options"
Since the Magento shopping cart is the last step before checkout, it makes sense that customers can leave gift messages at this stage. Gift messages provide a personalised experience and leave a favourable impression.
Magento allows you to configure gift messages by default, so you can enable this option in a matter of seconds.
9. Set up "Shopping Cart Tax Calculations"
In some countries, like the USA or Canada, the prices in online stores are displayed without taxes, leaving an unpleasant "surprise" at the checkout.
To avoid this, Magento allows you to make tax information visible in the customer's shopping cart.
Just navigate to Stores > Configuration > Sales > Tax > Shopping Cart Display Settings, and set up the available options according to your preferences.
However, if you haven't configured your tax classes, rates and rules yet, you'd better start right from this point.
10. Set up "Persistent Shopping Cart"
A persistent shopping cart allows customers to save their cart contents even if they have left your store for a certain period.
It means that when they return to a store, they can proceed to checkout without the need to add the products again. It saves a lot of time.
Moreover, by setting up Magento persistent shopping cart, you encourage your customers to complete the purchase without being pushy.
Note: remember that this is possible only when customers use browser cookies. If not, the cart won't be saved.
11. Set up "Wish List"
Your customers aren't always ready to purchase something right away. They might need some time to compare options, go through the advantages and disadvantages, etc. A wish list gives them a convenient way to save their favourite products in one place.
Once you configure wish lists in Magento 2, an "Add to Wish List" button appears on a product page. It helps your customers save products they are interested in for later.
Moreover, your customers can manage their wishlist by adjusting product quantities, adding personal notes, and sharing it with others.
12. Check Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules
Last, but not least are Magento shopping cart price rules. They allow you to set up certain conditions and provide coupons (discounts) that customers can apply in the shopping cart or checkout.
Magento Shopping Cart Management
Once you set up the Magento shopping cart, you're not finished. You still need to know how to manage it for a variety of reasons. It could be to resolve issues customers face during checkout, assist them in completing an order, or simply improve their shopping experience.
So, below are a few things that might come in handy when managing the Magento cart.
Find shopping carts in Magento admin
If you want to view the shopping cart of a customer who is currently buying something, log in to the Magento admin panel and go to Customers > All Customers.
Then find the needed customer's account in the grid and press Edit.
Finally, switch to the Shopping cart tab to view the content of the customer's cart.
Configure products in the shopping cart
Once you're already in the customers' shipping cart, you can change the colour, size or quantity of a product added.
To do so, open the customer's shopping cart and press the Configure button.
Then modify the required option and hit OK.
Delete products from shopping cart
If you need to delete an item from the customer's shopping cart from backend, just open the shopping cart and press the Delete button next to a corresponding product.
Apply coupons to the shopping cart automatically
As far as you know, by default, Magento enables you to create cart price rules to provide coupons.
But even if customers add the right products, or the right quantity of them to the cart, Magento won't apply the coupon automatically.
Customers have to find, copy or manually enter the coupon code at the shopping cart or checkout. As a result, they might just miss the deal simply because they don't want to go through all that copy-pasting.
Why waste their time if you can just apply coupon codes to the shopping cart automatically? Or even add products to the cart right on a click.
Example of the coupon code link that applied the "COUPONCODE15" coupon automatically
Add related products to cart
Related products, up-sells and cross-sells are additional items you offer a customer to increase the average order value.
They keep visitors engaged and help them find relevant products at every stage of their journey. However, they do not appear in the Magento 2 cart out of the box.
You have to add them to every item manually. Or you can add related products to Magento shopping cart automatically and under your own conditions (cart subtotal, product category, etc.).
In either case, consider adding some relevant items to the shopping cart. Customers who are already buying might as well add a few other items to their order.
Example of the related products in the shopping cart
Track shopping cart events
As a store owner, you are always searching for ways to understand your target audience better. What you may not realize is that your Magento shopping cart can tell you about your customers more than think.
But only if you track all customer interactions within the shopping cart on top of the abandoned cart reports.
So if you haven't already done it, set up the Google Tag Manager in Magento and track, view_cart, add_to_cart, remove_from_cart, and other important eCommerce events in your store.
When it comes to your store, customer experience is what matters the most. That's why Magento 2 shopping cart is so important.
It influences customers' purchasing decisions and increases your sales. So, pick the right tools to maximise your cart to boost overall satisfaction and drive conversions.
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