shopping cart for non registered users

Question

I am in the process of making a website that involves a shopping cart. There are two major requirements:

1. The user experience guys want login/authentication

Answer 1

Store in cookies the AnonymousSessionID, with which you associate a shopping cart in the database.

Then you'll have a scheduler task to erase anonymous sessions after some time (say, a day). This will keep your database clean of abandoned sessions.

If a user registers, you reassociate their shopping cart with their account permanently. If the users makes an order, you empty their shopping cart.