Sometimes you may want to display a compact shopping cart on your sidebar or in a post. This allows the users to see that they have items in the cart and they can click a view cart button to go to the full shopping cart page.

Use the following shortcode where you want to show the compact shopping cart:

[wp_compact_cart]

You can add this shortcode in a standard text widget to add the compact cart to the sidebar of your theme.

When there are no items in the cart, the shorcode will produce the following output:

When users add item(s) to the cart, it will show a compact shopping cart output like the following:

Clicking the “view cart” link will take them to the page that you specified in the “Checkout Page URL” field of the plugin settings.

Compact Cart Style 2

This second compact cart uses a different style than the one mentioned above. It looks like the following example:

To use this compact cart on your site, use the following shortcode:

[wp_compact_cart2]

You can add this shortcode in a standard text widget to add it to the sidebar of your site.

Creating a Specific Checkout Page for Your Site

You should create a checkout page before using the compact cart shortcode. Here is how to do it (if you haven’t done it already):

Step 1) Create a new WordPress page

Step 2) Add the following shortcode to this newly created page

[always_show_wp_shopping_cart]

Step 3) Go to the plugin settings and specify the URL of this newly created page in the “Checkout Page URL” field.

Showing a Compact Cart In Your Theme’s Header

Add the following code in your “header.php” file to show a compact cart in your theme’s header area:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[wp_compact_cart]'); ?>