Cart Concepts

In this document, you’ll learn about the main concepts related to carts in Medusa.

Cart#

A cart is the selection of product variants that a customer intends to purchase. It is represented by the Cart data model.

A cart holds informations about:

• The items the customer wants to buy.
• The customer's shipping and billing addresses.
• The shipping methods used to fulfill the items after purchase.
• The payment method and information necessary to complete the purchase.
  • These are stored and handled by the Payment Module.

Line Items#

A line item, represented by the LineItem data model, is a quantity of a product variant added to the cart. A cart has multiple line items.

A line item stores some of the product variant’s properties, such as the product_title and product_description. It also stores data related to the item’s quantity and price.

Shipping and Billing Addresses#

A cart has a shipping and billing address. Both of these addresses are represented by the Address data model.

Shipping Methods#

A shipping method, represented by the ShippingMethod data model, is used to fulfill the items in the cart after the order is placed. A cart can have more than one shipping method.

In the Medusa application, the shipping method is created from a shipping option, available through the Fulfillment Module. Its ID is stored in the shipping_option_id property of the method.

data Property#

After an order is placed, you can use a third-party fulfillment provider to fulfill its shipments.

If the fulfillment provider requires additional custom data to be passed along from the checkout process, set this data in the ShippingMethod's data property.

The data property is an object used to store custom data relevant later for fulfillment.