Cart Management vs Checkout workflow

Retired Boards Appdev Custom Storefronts
1

Good day!

I’m currently building a system using Shopify Storefront API as my backend. I’m trying to sew all the backend calls for the whole e-commerce workflow.

Customer Handling → Product Listing → Cart Management → Checkout Management → Order Management → Delivery

The described workflow above is currently my understanding. My question is, is my understanding correct? Because I’ve read in these articles:

https://shopify.dev/api/examples/cart

https://shopify.dev/api/examples/checkout

that there is a cart workflow and also a checkout workflow. I am I supposed to choose just one? Where do I find the criteria for the said workflow so that I can decide what should I use?

Also, I noticed that in the storefront API there is not delete cart. Am I supposed to handle a single cart record per customer? Or is the cart record being purged after the order is completed?

Can someone shed light on my questions.

Thanks in advance!

3 Likes
2

Have you figured this out? I have those same questions and taking over a headless build for a client and would like to have the differences fleshed out a bit more but tough to find documentation. Mainly need this since I’m trying to install recharge and their docs aren’t very helpful in this regard unfortunately…

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I agree, the documentation isn’t very clear what these different workflows are. A simple flow chart/diagram would help a lot to improve the docs. And why would one choose one over the other?