Cart

The cart is the buyer’s holding area for items they intend to purchase. From the seller’s perspective, two things matter most:

1. Cart-adds don’t reserve inventory. A buyer adding the last unit of a listing to their cart doesn’t decrement stock. The unit only leaves your inventory when the buyer completes checkout. Two buyers can race for one unit; whoever pays first wins.
2. You can’t see carts. You don’t know who’s looking, what they have in their cart, or how many people are circling a listing.

Multi-shop carts

Etsy lets buyers cart items from multiple shops at once. At checkout, Etsy splits the order: each shop is paid separately, gets its own shipping profile, and processes its own piece. The buyer sees one checkout flow but multiple receipts.

Implications

• Don’t overcommit a low-stock listing. If you have 1 unit and 5 favoriters, the first checkout wins. Sometimes Etsy will allow oversells; you have to message and refund the losers.
• Abandoned cart recovery (see the entry) is the only seller-facing tool that touches cart behavior. There’s no “reach out to people with items in cart” feature.

Why this often surprises sellers

Most other marketplaces reserve cart inventory for a few minutes. Etsy doesn’t. For high-velocity products this means oversells happen, and the only fix is staying ahead on stock.