Your cart & checkout

This page explains what happens to your cart from the moment you add something to the moment you pay — and afterwards.

The short version

What you can count on

• Your cart survives 14 days of not touching it, and comes right back when you return.
• While you’re paying, we hold your items for you for at most 30 minutes.
• Editing your cart safely restarts checkout — you’re never stuck.
• A failed payment never empties your cart — you can just try again.

Items held while you pay

When you reach the payment step, we briefly hold what you’re buying — the stock, any discount, gift card, store credit, or license key — so it can’t sell out from under you while you enter your payment. This hold happens at payment, not when you add to cart, so browsing never ties up stock. (Event time slots are the one exception: the slot is held the moment you pick it, because the slot is the product.)

Every hold has a time limit and releases the instant it expires, so nothing stays locked up by accident.

While a payment is in progress

1. Starting to pay opens a short checkout session — 20 minutes, extended a bit if you’re actively working through it, up to 30 minutes total.
2. While a payment attempt is actually live, your cart is locked — it can’t be changed, so the amount you’re paying always matches your cart. (Not even the store can edit it mid-payment.)
3. If a payment is declined or fails, your session stays open — you can just try again until the time runs out. Nothing is emptied.

Note

If you edit your cart when a checkout is open but no payment is actually in flight, we simply cancel that checkout, release the held items, apply your edit, and start checkout fresh. You’re never trapped behind your own half-finished checkout. And if you back out to your cart, the held items release within seconds rather than waiting for the timer.

After checkout

When your order is placed, exactly the items that were held for you are turned into your order in one step. If anything goes wrong at that moment, the holds are simply released — nothing is half-charged or half-reserved.

How long your cart lasts

1. A cart you stop touching becomes abandoned after a period of inactivity. That’s just a marketing-and-recovery state, never a lock — coming back and viewing or changing the cart brings it right back to life.
2. Your cart stays recoverable for 14 days, refreshed every time you interact with it.
3. Old carts that never turned into an order are eventually cleared out, along with any personal details on them. Carts that did become orders keep their history, but personal contact details are cleaned up over time.

Caution

A cart and its currency go together. If you return to an abandoned cart and the store’s currency has changed, we ask you to start a new cart rather than mix currencies.

Abandoned-cart reminders

If you leave items behind and the store has your email, it may send up to two reminder emails — a first nudge after a few hours (the store can tune this) and a second a couple of days later — and no more. Stores that work with phone numbers only don’t send cart reminders at all, because we don’t send marketing texts.

A cart that’s in the middle of checkout is never swept away or reminded about mid-payment — the checkout always finishes or is cancelled first.