- Short answer
- Allow it deliberately: on POS Pro, View abandoned checkouts shows an identified customer's online cart; adding their email needs two more permissions.
- What stays hidden
- Only the products in the online cart; Shopify says the browsing history is not viewable.
- Four conditions
- Identified customer, an email address, an eligible abandoned checkout, and a POS session with location context.
- It expires
- Online carts in POS expire within 90 days of creation, or 30 days from the last update.
- The gate
- POS roles are Pro-only per Shopify's permissions page; the changelog announcing the cart never names POS Pro.
- Starting state
- Granted inside the POS role; the Shopify pages we read on October 19, 2026 don't state its starting state.
- As of
- Shopify's changelog entry and its Help Center POS permission and online-cart pages, read October 19, 2026.
What does Shopify POS actually show your staff?
Shopify's changelog describes the moment precisely: when a known customer shops in store, staff can look them up in POS and see whether they have items in their online cart. Shopify's Help Center adds that POS shows up to three of those products, with View all opening the rest. With View abandoned checkouts and the two customer permissions named below allowed, staff can also add those items to the POS cart.
Only the products in the customer's online cart is viewable, not their browsing history.
Which permission lets POS staff see the online cart?
The permission that controls it is View abandoned checkouts, in Shopify Admin under Settings > Users > Roles > POS Role(s) > Customers, documented as Allowed or Denied. Staff also need Create new customers and View customer details to add the customer's email address to the POS cart before the online cart items can be viewed.
- Settings
- Users
- Roles
- Add role
- Customers
Neither the changelog nor the Help Center POS permissions page we read on October 19, 2026 states which way that setting starts on a new POS role, so open the role and look.
POS roles are documented as available only for locations on the Shopify POS Pro subscription, and the changelog announcing the online cart never names POS Pro. Who is allowed to create or edit that role is a separate answer.
How often will there actually be a cart to see?
Four conditions have to hold at once: the customer is identified, has an email address, has an eligible abandoned checkout, and the POS session has location context — on Shopify POS v11.14 or later.
The third condition does the filtering, because an abandoned checkout is not an abandoned cart: it exists only once the shopper entered an email at checkout and left it incomplete for 10 minutes. For carts that never reach checkout, see what Shopify shows you before checkout.
Even when all of them hold, the cart does not wait forever: online carts in POS expire within 90 days of creation or 30 days from the last update. Cart sharing is a different feature — a cart staff built in POS themselves.
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