Carts and checkout

A cart holds a customer’s selections until checkout turns it into an order. Use this page to see how that happens, what you can change about checkout with configuration alone, and where a change needs work on the theme.

How a cart becomes an order

1. A visitor adds a product and StoreConnect creates a Cart for their session (web, POS or API). An anonymous cart lives only as long as the browser session; signing in attaches the cart to the customer, so they can come back to it later. See About carts: statuses, sessions, flows.
2. The customer moves through the checkout steps: customer details, shipping, then payment. Each step updates the cart’s status.
3. On successful payment (or a quote request), the cart converts into an Order with Status Draft, and the order products and payment are written to Salesforce; see Cart to order conversion and How an order is recorded in Salesforce.
4. The order’s Checkout Step ends in -syncing until payment finalizes, then in -finalized while the records sync to Salesforce, and reaches complete when the sync is done. Trigger Flows and transactional emails from complete, not from order creation; see About order checkout steps.
5. A web cart that has not converted a set time after it was created is marked abandoned, and can then be reported on or cleaned up. The window is 10 hours by default and is set with the cart_abandoned_hours store variable; see Process empty and abandoned carts.

What you can configure without changing the theme

Most checkout behavior is controlled from Salesforce, through Store settings, store variables and the records below. Each row links to the article that covers it.

Customer details step

To	See
Collect a company name, or split the name into first and last name fields	Collect company details at checkout, Show first and last name fields at checkout
Make state and postcode optional for countries that do not use them	Address field localization at checkout
Offer address autocomplete	Google address autocomplete, Addressfinder integration
Let the customer ship to someone else, or add delivery instructions	Ship items to a third party, Add delivery instructions with shipping notes
Ask extra questions, with conditions that show or hide them based on earlier answers	Custom forms (checkout forms and product forms)
Require acceptance of terms, or a signature	Require terms & conditions acceptance at checkout, Collect customer signature at checkout
Block bots	Adding captcha to your checkout flow

Shipping step

To	See
Set flat, tiered, weight or price based rates, and free shipping for chosen products	Custom shipping rates
Quote live carrier rates	Set up shipping providers
Offer collection from a store or warehouse	Click-and-collect configuration

Payment step

Which payment methods a customer sees depends on the payment providers configured for the store, plus a small number of per-customer settings.

To	See
Offer cards, ACH, buy now pay later, or wallet buttons on product and cart pages	Payment methods, Express checkout
Let approved B2B customers pay on account with a PO number, per Account and Contact	Pay on account at checkout
Let customers pay with account credit or loyalty points	Account credit, Loyalty points
Take a deposit at checkout and the balance later	Accept deposits for purchases
Pass a payment provider’s fee to the customer	Passing payment surcharges to customers

Prices and offers

To	See
Apply automatic discounts, or promo codes the customer enters	Discounts, Promotions
Sell and redeem vouchers	Vouchers
Hide prices and take quote requests instead of payment	Enable customers to request product quotes
Let the customer choose the amount, for donations and tips	Variable pricing for donations and tips

Carts

To	See
See every cart a customer has, and let them reorder from a past cart	Manage multiple carts per customer
Build a cart in Salesforce and send the customer a link to pay	Build and send a cart to a customer
Link straight to a pre-filled cart or checkout from an email, ad or Salesforce Flow	Direct to cart link
Report on carts, or find out why one did not convert	Review carts and generate cart reports, Troubleshoot carts

After checkout

To	See
Send order confirmation, shipped and fulfilled emails	Transactional emails
Define the statuses an order moves through	Set up order paths
Record who assisted a sale	Link a staff member to an order

What needs theme work

The options above cover the checkout as StoreConnect ships it. Anything conditional on data the standard checkout does not look at is a theme change, made in Liquid by whoever maintains your theme:

• Showing or hiding a payment method based on a value on the cart, the customer or the products in it (for example, offering only pay on account when a custom checkbox on the cart is set). The standard checkout decides payment methods from the payment providers and the Account and Contact settings listed above, not from custom fields.
• Changing the order or layout of the checkout steps, or adding a step.
• Adding fields to checkout beyond what store variables and custom forms provide, and writing them to the order.

For these, start with Theme templates for how a client theme overrides the checkout templates, Liquid controllers for running logic server-side during checkout, and Cart and checkout configuration in the store design section for the design-side settings. If you are unsure whether a change is configuration or theme work, contact support with the behavior you want.

In this section

• About carts: statuses, sessions, and flows
• Process empty and abandoned carts
• Manage multiple carts per customer
• Review carts and generate cart reports
• Build and send a cart to a customer
• Direct to cart link
• Cart to order conversion
• Express checkout
• Collect company details at checkout
• Ship items to a third party
• Adding captcha to your checkout flow
• Troubleshoot carts