Cart
A Cart in Salesforce (WebCart in the API) is a standard Commerce Cloud object that represents an active or abandoned shopping cart for a buyer on a Salesforce Lightning B2B or B2B2C Commerce storefront.
Definition
A Cart in Salesforce (WebCart in the API) is a standard Commerce Cloud object that represents an active or abandoned shopping cart for a buyer on a Salesforce Lightning B2B or B2B2C Commerce storefront. Each Cart record holds a Name, an AccountId (the buying organization for B2B, or the buyer Account for B2C), an OwnerId, a Status (Active, Checkout, Pending Order, Processing Order, Closed), BuyerGroupId for entitled price-list resolution, currency, and totals fields including SubtotalAmount, TotalTaxAmount, TotalShippingAmount, and GrandTotalAmount. Carts are the central transaction object in Commerce Cloud — they collect Cart Items as the buyer browses, evaluate pricing through Price Books and entitlements, hold promo and coupon adjustments, and ultimately produce an Order when the buyer checks out. Salesforce Commerce supports multiple concurrent Carts per buyer (B2B buyers managing parallel quote requests, for example) and persists abandoned Carts for marketing-driven re-engagement campaigns.
In plain English
“A Cart is the digital shopping cart on a Salesforce-powered storefront — the place where a buyer collects items they want to purchase before checking out. Like Amazon's cart, it tracks what they've added, calculates totals, applies discounts, and persists across sessions until they either check out (turning it into an Order) or abandon it.”
Worked example
A buyer at a B2B distributor logs into a Salesforce Lightning B2B Commerce storefront and starts shopping. As they add three products to their cart, Salesforce creates a Cart record with Status = Active linked to their organization's Account, and three Cart Item child records — one per added product — each capturing Quantity, ListPrice, and SalesPrice resolved through the buyer's contracted Price Book. The buyer applies a coupon code that adjusts GrandTotalAmount down by 10%. They click Checkout, which moves the Cart's Status to Checkout while shipping and tax calculations run, then to Pending Order while the order processes. On successful order creation, the Cart's Status flips to Closed and a corresponding Order is generated with copies of the Cart Items as Order Products.
Why Cart matters
Carts in Lightning B2B Commerce are tightly integrated with the Pricing Procedure and Promotion frameworks. Each price recalculation on a Cart triggers a server-side evaluation that resolves the buyer's entitled Price Book, applies any active promotions through the Promotions object, layers discount adjustments, and computes tax through the configured tax engine (Avalara, Vertex, native tax tables). This pipeline is exposed through extension points so commerce orgs can inject custom pricing logic at well-defined hooks without forking the standard checkout.
Cart status transitions are highly opinionated. Active means the buyer can freely add and remove items; Checkout locks the cart contents while payment and shipping run; Pending Order means the cart is being converted to an Order; Processing Order means the Order has been created but Order processing is in progress; Closed marks completion. Failed transitions are recoverable through admin tools, but Cart status is treated as a state machine — direct updates to Status are restricted, and most state changes flow through the Salesforce Commerce APIs.
Abandoned Carts are first-class data in Commerce Cloud. Carts that sit in Active status without checkout activity for a configurable threshold are considered abandoned and become eligible for re-engagement campaigns through Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement. Reporting on cart abandonment rate, average abandoned cart value, and time-to-abandonment is one of the highest-leverage analytics in any commerce implementation.
How organizations use Cart
Maintains active Carts for thousands of buyers concurrently. Each buyer's Cart applies their organization's contracted price list through BuyerGroup-driven entitlement, and reordering historical purchases is one click — the Cart pre-fills from a prior closed Order.
Tracks abandoned Carts as a primary growth metric. Carts inactive for 24 hours trigger an email sequence through Marketing Cloud that links back to the persisted Cart with a small recovery discount, recovering an estimated 12% of would-be lost revenue.
Allows inside-sales reps to view a customer's active Cart from within Sales Cloud, edit pricing or apply rep-specific discounts, then push the Cart back to the buyer for self-service checkout. Bridging Cart visibility between Sales and Commerce is a defining feature of B2B configure-to-order motion.
Trust & references
Straight from the source — Salesforce's reference material on Cart.
- WebCart in Object Reference for the Salesforce PlatformSalesforce Developer Documentation
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