Adding items to a shopping cart by users before registration/authentication

Hi guys,

may I know how should I allowed not-login user to add items? (We are using customized solution without using an open source eCommerce package)

The consideration is:

1. Store at database: If the not-login user information is stored in database as guest user(create a newid for each user and store that id as in session of the browser), then how should we know when to delete them?
   
2. Store at client: If all information is maintained in cookie, it would need to write a seperate set of code for this, that would be troublesome.

Is there any suggestion?

 

The cart database shouldn't have any required relationship with a users database. You would simply use a user's session ID to keep track of shopping cart items in the database. This covers members and guests. You can use an optional reference to the member table if you want a persistent cart for logged in users.