The Cart tab is empty
Updated September 15, 2026
The Cart tab shows No active cart when there is nothing to read for that customer. That is usually correct rather than a fault, but there are a few cases where a cart exists and is still not shown.
The customer genuinely has no cart
The most common reason. Anything they add will appear while their cart is live, and for a registered customer it stays visible for as long as WooCommerce keeps their saved cart.
The session has expired
WooCommerce keeps a registered customer’s session for a week and a guest’s for two days, then clears it. For a registered customer the items usually survive as a saved cart against their account, which is shown with a Saved cart status. A guest cart is gone for good once the session expires.
A guest who has not reached checkout
A guest session has a random key with nothing tying it to a person, so guest carts are matched on the email address entered at checkout. Until the guest fills in that field there is no way to connect their cart to them, and the tab will say so.
The sessions table is very large
Matching a guest cart means searching the WooCommerce sessions table. To keep that from becoming expensive, the search is skipped when the table holds more than 50,000 rows, and the tab shows no cart.
WooCommerce clears expired sessions daily, which normally keeps the table small. If yours has grown very large, check that the session cleanup task is running under WooCommerce › Status › Scheduled Actions. Developers can change the threshold with the acreports_max_cart_session_rows filter.
Cart contents are hidden
In the free version the headline figures, meaning cart value, item count and when it was last updated, are shown, but the line-by-line contents, totals and coupons are a Pro feature and show an upgrade prompt instead.
You are looking at a store-wide report
There is no Cart tab on a store-wide report, because a cart belongs to an individual. Search for the specific customer to see theirs.