- Short answer
- Allow it only deliberately: on POS Pro, a role you grant View abandoned checkouts sees an identified customer's online cart items.
- 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 September 10, 2026 don't state its starting state.
- As of
- Shopify's changelog entry and its Help Center POS permission and online-cart pages, read September 10, 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.
Only the products in the customer's online cart is viewable, not their browsing history.
Which permission lets POS staff see the online cart?
One switch controls it: 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.
Neither the changelog nor the Help Center POS permissions page we read on September 10, 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.
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.
This article was written entirely by AI under human editorial direction. The editor sets the topic and structure, runs multi-stage validation on facts, links, and interactive elements, and verifies the output is useful from a business perspective. All claims are checked against official Shopify sources. Details may change — always confirm critical data at shopify.com.
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