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It is not essential to understand the format of a shopping basket, although it is reassuring to know how your customers' data is stored. Firstly, all information in the shopping basket is anonymous.

Each shopping basket is stored as a separate text file. (No database is required to hold shopping baskets.) The shopping basket is stored as a Colon Delimited Values [CDV], like the catalogue. Each line of the shopping basket represents the quantity of one product. The file represents ...

• Product code
• Quantity
• Colour
• Size

The shopping basket has a very compact representation. For short product codes and small quantities, it is quite typical for each entry in a shopping basket to be about nine or 10 bytes each. The reason for this is that prices and descriptions are taken from the catalogue file. This allows changes in price and description to be updated in real time across all shopping baskets.