There are many topics covered in this Drupal Commerce Anonymous Carts article. The experience you want to give your customers can greatly depend on how well you handle the Anonymous to Authenticated conversion process. Much of this is automated, but there can be a few hang ups.
What happens when an anonymous customer finds a product and clicks "Add to Cart?" An order is created for that customer's anonymous session. Like most customers, they realize that logging in with their account can give them a certain advantage during the checkout process. Perhaps they don't have to fill out their customer profile information or perhaps they are a part of a "Free Shipping" user role. What happens to their cart?
When anonymous users login to the site, if they have a shopping cart, that order is moved to be a part of the authenticated session. Anonymous cart conversion is that simple! To borrow from a certain hardware manufacturer, it should just work.
The methods described in this section show you how to hide the shopping carts in various ways, but we do not describe how to keep users from purchasing content if they are anonymous. That is a much more involved topic and possibly a feature request for the commerce_checkout_login module.
In most cases, if you want the shopping cart to be hidden from anonymous users, hiding the block is the easiest way to pull this off. Below are two screenshots that will help you with this functionality. If you prefer the more robust method of hiding the shopping cart using the Views interface, skip down to that section below.
If you want to hide the /cart page, we have a very simple method that requires editing a core View. Relax, that's why we use Views instead of our own half-baked solutions. And think of it this way, if you edit your view and it doesn't work out, you can always click "Revert" and everything will go back to the fresh and shiny version that ships with Commerce.
Be sure to click "Save" on the View and test your shopping cart for what an anonymous user would experience.
Let's say you don't like the default "empty" shopping cart that appears in the sidebar for Commerce Kickstart. There is a not-so-straightforward way to do this, so hang in there. The Shopping Cart Block that is enabled in the Commerce Kickstart project is actually setup in code. What we need to do is disable that block, create a new Views Block, and enable the Views block instead.
Old carts will remain indefinitely until they are checked out or manually removed by administrators. Old cart orders can contain valuable information that you may not want to erase before extracting the data for use particularly as marketing research or contact information for follow-up sales contacts.
This can cause some confusion given the following scenario:
In this case, you may find some nicely handled features in a contributed module that can expire carts for you: commerce_cart_expiration.
And a screencast on how to implement:
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