Magento shopping cart is an intermediary step your customer takes before moving to checkout. Correspondingly, it is often a step when customers exit a website, leaving you wondering — why?
To avoid cart abandonment in Magento and boost shopping experience you have to take a closer look at the shopping cart options.
So, here you'll learn how to configure the cart redirect link, mini cart, cart thumbnails, and more Magento shopping cart features.
Want to track how many customers add or remove products from their carts? Add Magento 2 Google Tag Manager to your store and get in-depth reports on customers' behaviour.
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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 options.
1. Configure My Cart Link
The Magento shopping cart link is located in the upper-right corner of the website header. It displays the number of products customers add to the cart.
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 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.
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 catalog page. So, customers can quickly review what they've already added to the cart.
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.
- 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.
Note: sometimes mini cart is not synchronized across multiple devices and browsers for registered customers. They just need to open the shopping cart page to view the items.
3. Set Redirect to 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 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. Define Quote Lifetime
Sometimes customers 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. Configure 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 chose. However, when products have variations, thumbnails in the cart might not correspond to the added items.
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. Specify 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. Configure Minimum Order Amount
Another Magento shopping cart option that also encourages purchases, is the minimum order amount. According to it, customers have to meet 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 shopping cart is the last step before checkout, it makes sense that customers can leave gift messages at this stage. Gift messages provide a personalized 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. Check Shopping Cart Rules
Last, but not least are Magento shopping cart price rules you configure to provide discounts. Cart price rules allow you to set up certain conditions and provide coupons that customers can apply in the shopping cart or checkout.
Note: you can also apply coupons automatically to make it easier for your customers to receive a discount.
Great way to encourage customers to buy more, isn't it?
When it comes to your store, customer experience is what matters the most. Magento shopping cart is an important step since it influences customers' purchasing decisions. And now you know how to configure Magentyo 2 shopping cart properly.
However, it's always useful to explore as many possibilities as you can. So, why not have a look at the Magento persistent shopping cart? It might do it even better than the regular one.
