The software's 'cart' system is used any time a user is listing an item on your site, upgrading a listing, renewing a listing, purchasing a subscription, adding money to their account, or purchasing a storefront subscription.

The cart allows clients on your site to place multiple items in the cart at once while only needing to go through the payment process once. The type of items in the cart do not matter¹⁾. The client could place a new classified ad, new auction, an existing auction renewal, extend their storefront subscription, all within the same cart and only need to go through the payment process once. This can possibly save the site plenty in the transaction charges.

The cart keeps track of a client's attempt at placing/renewing/editing a listing. This means that if a client starts to place a classified through the cart and abandons that attempt before completing, that "session" is still kept in the system, until the user's cart "expires"²⁾. So the next time they return to the site, they will be able to resume placing the listing from where they left off. They can either discard the previous attempt or complete that process.

If the user were to start adding something to the cart, but does not get to the Listing Cart page as shown in the screenshot at the top of this page, it will save the progress to allow resuming at a later time. If the user tries to add something else to their cart before they finish adding the first item, even if it is a few days later, they have a choice: either finish what they already started, or cancel what is already started (loosing any progress they made) and start the process of adding the new item to the cart. This can sometimes be a little confusing, especially if your site does not use the My Account Links module during the listing placement/renewal/upgrade process. When using the My Account Links module during add item to cart process, it will display what the user is currently working on, and allow them to cancel adding that item, or if on another my account page not related to adding the item to the cart (such as the "my active listings" page or the "my account home" page), they can resume that process easily by clicking the Resume link. By not having the My Account Links module used on those pages, it is not as clear to the user what is going on, so can be a little more confusing. We recommend using the My Account Links module on any page dealing with "my account" or with adding items to the cart. One common point of confusion, is when the user starts to add something to the cart (for instance, renewing a listing), then refreshes the page, or comes back to it later and tries to do the same thing again. In that case it can be confusing since the 2 different options they are given, almost seem like the same thing. Like mentioned above, we have found that this confusion is almost totally avoided by making use of the my account links module and using the new My Account Home page.