A default shopping cart handed to every visitor—long before they show intent—is one of the most expensive engineering shortcuts in modern e-commerce. It silently forces your platform to create and maintain a relationship with the most distant, stateful component for users who will never buy, consuming database, session, and cache resources that should be reserved for real customers. The result is slower pages, higher abandonment, unpredictable behavior under load, and infrastructure bills inflated by processing millions of unnecessary cart transactions. In short: the default cart doesn't just waste system capacity—it taxes every conversion you fight to earn, turning a hidden engineering flaw into a recurring sales and hosting cost that scales with your traffic, not your revenue.