The shopping cart provides the customer with confirmation of the items they are in the process of choosing to buy.

The cart provides some cart maintenance functions. Users can:

• Delete an item
• Change the quantity of an item
• Amend any options set against an item, if it is a complex item

Once they are decided on what to buy, the cart collects their name and address details.

If the cart is abandoned, the cart is emptied after a configurable timeout. If you are not using stock control, you can set this to vary long time - days, even. However, if you are using stock control, you may want to set it shorter, as items in a cart are reserved for that user to prevent 'cart races'. (Cart races occur with some systems which allow two people to both put the last item in their cart, and both then buy the item, with one of them ending up dissapointed. neatComponents prevents this from happening)