How to Serve Multiple Customers Effectively with Saved Carts

Serving more than one customer at a time is an essential part of being an effective store employee. But if your store has a small retail team or serves a high volume of customers, it can be difficult to do that effectively. 

Even if store staff manage to juggle serving multiple customers, oftentimes they need to re-enter the customer’s items in the POS system at checkout to complete the transaction. The result is an inefficient and repetitive checkout experience that leaves both store staff and customers feeling like things could have gone smoother.  

That’s where saving and retrieving carts in Shopify POS comes in handy. When multiple customers are shopping at once, it’s the best way to keep track of people’s orders without multiple re-entries or writing notes including the item number and customer name for the cashier to process the sale. 

Saving and retrieving carts is the easiest way for Shopify merchants to confidently serve multiple customers, keep checkout moving fast, and even convert abandoned store sales into revenue. 

What are saved carts?

Save cart is a tool that lets store staff save a customer’s cart and retrieve it later. Save cart makes it easier for store staff to keep checkout moving fast and convert more no-shows into sales. 

For store staff, saved carts help them serve multiple customers without losing track or having to prepare the same order twice. They can quickly toggle between saved carts, pick up where they left off, and close sales. When a customer leaves the store and doesn’t come back, store staff can also send the cart by email. If the customer completes a purchase via the email, staff are credited for making the sale even if it happened online.  

Saving carts help store staff serve multiple customers at once complete checkouts without re-entering items in their POS system.

For store owners, saving carts is a great tool for collecting customer contact information. Store staff can create customer profiles—including the customer’s name, phone number, and email address–and associate it to the saved cart. This makes it easier to find a customer’s saved cart when they come back to complete the purchase. It also helps merchants grow their email list, fuel remarketing campaigns, and grow revenue. 

For customers, saved carts give them flexibility. They can visit other shops and take their time before making a purchase and, if they decide to buy, their order is ready and checkout will be efficient. As soon as items are reserved in a shopper’s cart, that inventory is reserved and not available to be bought until the cart is cleared. 

All that makes saving and retrieving carts an essential part of any merchant’s in-store workflows. It can fuel your marketing while improving customer service, checkout efficiency, and store conversions. 

What are the benefits of saved carts?

For retailers with small teams or who serve a high volume of customers, saving carts in your Shopify POS and retrieving them later helps improve checkout efficiency while giving shoppers a more flexible customer experience. They can leave the store and come back later, knowing their order is ready and that items haven’t been sold in the meantime.

Let’s dive into the benefits saving and retrieving carts offers both you and your customers: 

Keep checkout moving fast

Saving and retrieving carts is an accessible way to speed up your store’s checkout. 

Saving and retrieving carts prevents store staff from losing order details and spending time searching for and re-entering products to a customer’s cart at checkout.

Let’s say the customer you’re checking out forgets their wallet or needs to go grab another item. Rather than wait for them to come back and keep the line held up, you can save their cart, check out the next person in line, and retrieve the customer’s cart when they come back. 

The order’s details—including items, applicable discounts or promotions, notes, and the order total—are saved so you can complete the checkout quicker. 

Give indecisive shoppers more time

If a shopper wants to visit other stores before making a decision, saving their cart ensures you’re ready when they come back. 

Store staff can load the shopper’s cart with the items they were interested in, save it, and come back to it later once the shopper returns. All items will be ready, so you can avoid asking the customer which items they wanted and having to re-add them to the cart again.

Help small teams do more  

When you serve multiple customers at once, switching conversations makes it challenging to keep track of which products each person you served was interested in. For small retail teams who often find themselves serving more than one customer at a time, saved carts ensure they make fewer mistakes and customer service is efficient.  

Rather than relying on memory or handwritten notes, store staff can build a cart with the items a customer was interested in, save it, and move on to serving other customers. 

Increase store revenue 

When used in tandem with Shopify’s send cart feature, saving carts is an accessible way to convert more no-shows into sales. 

Send saved carts to shoppers by email to convert more no-shows into sales and maximize your store’s revenue.

Rather than lose the sale, store staff can view saved carts at the end of their shift and send them to customers by email. If the customer completes a purchase via the email, the store staff who sent the email gets credit for closing the sale—even if it happened online rather than in-store. 

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How saved carts work

Now that you’re familiar with the benefits of saving and retrieving carts, let’s go over how it works in four simple steps. 

• Add products to the customer’s cart
• Add the customer’s profile to the order 
• Save the cart
• View and retrieve the saved cart
• Take payment and complete checkout

1. Add products to the customer’s cart

Once the shopper finds which products they’re interested in, store staff add those items to their cart in Shopify POS, just like they would for a traditional sale. 

2. Add the customer’s profile to the cart 

We recommend attaching the customer’s profile to the cart. When the customer comes back, store staff can search for their cart by name and find the order faster. 

If the customer doesn’t come back to complete their purchase, attaching a customer profile to the cart enables store staff to send the cart to their email address and potentially close the sale. 

If the customer already has a profile, you can search for it from the Shopify POS home screen. If they don’t have a customer profile, create one, collect their contact information, and associate it with the order. 

3. Save the cart

Once the customer’s profile has been associated with the order, store staff can select Save cart after clicking More actions on the cart screen. Carts are saved to the POS terminal, so staff can log in and view carts saved on any tablet or smartphone with the Shopify POS app installed.  

Once the cart is saved, you can safely serve another customer and retrieve it later. 

4. View and retrieve the saved cart

To view all the carts you saved, select View saved carts from the Shopify POS home screen. From here, you’ll see all the carts saved over the past 24 hours, the customer associated with each saved cart, and when they were saved. 

To retrieve the cart and complete the sale, select the cart you’d like to view. 

5. Take payment and complete checkout

When the customer is ready to pay, proceed to checkout and take payment like you normally would to complete the sale. 

Tips for using saved carts

Now that you know how saving and retrieving a cart works in Shopify POS, let’s go over some tips to use them effectively and maximize store revenue. 

Link customer profiles to carts

One of the biggest benefits of saving carts is the ability to close a sale even if the customer leaves your store and doesn’t return. To set up that opportunity, though, you need to collect the customer’s contact information. 

Add a customer’s name and contact information to their cart to ensure it’s easier to find when they return. If they don’t come back to complete their purchase, send the cart to their email address to potentially close the sale.

When saving the customer’s cart, ask them if they’d like to share their name and contact information to make it easier for store staff to retrieve the cart when they return. This makes checkout more efficient if the customer comes back while ensuring store staff can send the cart via email if the customer doesn’t return to the store to complete their purchase. 

Add a save cart tile to your Shopify POS home screen

To speed up service for shoppers who return to your store to complete their purchase, consider adding a shortcut to your Shopify POS home screen. 

Rather than manually searching for orders, adding a View saved carts tile to your home screen helps store staff find and complete orders that were saved faster.

Download complementary checkout apps 

When customers come back to complete their purchase, store staff have a great opportunity to recommend complementary items and increase the value of the sale. 

To do this more effectively, we recommend using apps like Marsello or Frequently Bought Together. With these apps, store staff will see related products in the checkout screen, making it easier than ever to make more relevant recommendations and increase order value.  

Clear saved carts at the end of each shift

Carts that are saved in Shopify POS last 24 hours. To ensure as many saved carts convert into revenue as possible, we recommend that store staff clear their saved carts at the end of each shift.

Clear saved carts by sending them to customers via email in Shopify POS. If the customer buys something, the staff who sent the email cart will get credit for making the sale in Shopify’s staff reports. If your staff get commission for each sale they make, this also ensures they maximize their earning potential. 

Use saved carts to increase checkout speed and store sales

One of the reasons customers love shopping in-person is that it allows them to interact with products and store staff before deciding what to buy—but if you have a smaller retail team or serve a high volume of customers, one-to-one customer service may not always be possible.

Saving and retrieving carts is an accessible tool to help store staff serve multiple customers at once and keep track of the items they’re interested in without relying on memory. That makes for a smoother and more efficient checkout experience for both store staff and shoppers. 

Saving carts is also a powerful tool that fuels both sales and your marketing efforts. Collect customer contact information when saving carts to build your email list and fuel your remarketing campaigns, and use Shopify’s send cart feature to convert unrealized saved carts into sales. 

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