How Long Do Items Stay In Your Etsy Cart? | A Simple Guide

  • By: Reece Williams
  • Date: June 29, 2022
  • Time to read: 3 min.

Browsing Etsy is great fun. I often find I spend ages picking the perfect items, and before I know it my cart is full the the brim!

Like every online store Etsy holds your items in your cart ready for the next time you shop, which is great for me as I’m able to select exactly what I want even if I’m not planning on buying the items right away.

Also, as a seller it is important to understand how the cart works, and how it affects how, and what you can sell.

The first question is, how long do items stay in your cart? Etsy does not clear items from your cart. Items can stay in a cart for as long as the listing is available.

What Does It Mean When Someone Has Something In Their Cart on Etsy?

How Long Do Items Stay In Your Etsy Cart?

On listing it often shows “x number of people have this item in their cart”. This number is the number of users that have added the item to their cart but have not entered checkout.

Items in carts on Etsy does not reserve the item’s stock – so if there are 5 of a product in stock and 4 users have it in their cart the full 5 are still available to buy.

It is impossible for a user to “hoard” a listing’s stock, so sellers should not be concerned about a listings availability if all the stock is in customer baskets.

Having a listing with a high “x have this item in their cart” number is a good thing. These messages are used to create scarcity, and is known to improve sale conversions!

How Many Items Can I Have In My Etsy Cart?

Etsy allows up to 99 items in a cart at any one time.

It is extremely rare for customers to hit this limit, but it can be an issue for those who sell supplies.

If you are finding customers are unable to purchase because they’ve hit the “99 item” limit then consider doing one of the following:

  1. Make custom orders for large purchases. In this order you will note exactly what the customer will get, but it will be contained in a single custom listing. This removes the need for multiple items in the customer’s cart
  2. create “bulk” variants of your listings. For example if I was selling stickers, instead of having a listing for “1 sticker” (which may have issues if a customer wanted 100 stickers) I would have a single listing but with “size” variants of 1, 10 and 100. This way if a customer wanted 100 stickers they can select the 100 size variation. This would be added to the cart as a single listing, but they will still get the 100 stickers

Does Etsy Remove Items From Cart?

The only time Etsy will remove an item from a customer’s cart is if the listing is no longer for sale. There are a few reasons why a listing may become unavailable, such as:

  • the listing has not sold in 90 days and the listing expires
  • the listing is manually removed from the store by the seller
  • the store has permanently closed down

Conclusion

To clarify – Etsy cart items stay in the cart indefinitely. They will stay there for as long as the listing is for sale.

There is no reason why Etsy will remove an item from a customer’s cart, unless the listing is removed from the Etsy marketplace.

Items in Etsy carts are counted up and used to show buyers how popular a listing is. This is great for sellers are it creates a scarcity mindset, and can improve sale conversions.