A Persistent Cart is a tool provided by Magento 2, which is one of the most popular platforms used by e-commerce businesses. Once this tool is enabled by admin in the backend, it will keep tracks of items that are added to cart but have not been purchased by customers. The information saved will be shown up in the next time that customer shopping on your store. In other words, a “remembered” customer can have their previous buying activities stored and be available for the next visit.
From a store owner point of view, a Persistent Cart can help to bring better shopping experiences to your customers, improve your brand image and gain more loyal customers to your store. Moreover, a persistent shopping cart can minimize the number of empty carts, which results in an increase in sales.
When the Persistent Cart is activated, registered customers are required to log in with their own accounts before going through checkout. For guest shoppers, they need to sign up with new account if they want to recover information from their last shopping.
In order to use the Persistent Cart, customers have to enable two cookies for their browsers. During the operation, these following two cookies are required:
- Session Cookie: Is a short-term cookie. Its duration is only a single customer visit to your site. In other words, the cookies starts when a customer logs in and expires when that customer leaves.
- Persistent Cookie: Is a long-term cookie. Unlike Session Cookie, Persistent Cookie remains functioning even when customers leave the store. This cookie also allow to record the contents of customers’ shopping activities for future reference. Persistent Cookie duration can be set to a period of time depending on your preference, but the maximum is 31,536,000 seconds (this number is equal to one year) set by default Magento 2.
Up to now, you may have a clear overview of Persistent Cart used in Magento 2. Don’t forget to Like, Share, and Subscribe to Magestandard for more informative Magento extension review articles.