I am in the process of making a website that involves a shopping cart. There are two major requirements:
The user experience guys want login/authentication to be the very last step in the entire work flow. The user gets to do all the shopping and is asked to login only at the time of checking out.
The shopping cart shouldn't expire(not even on browser close) unless the user (registered or not) does check-out.
In the above context, I have the following question with respect to maintaining the cart's state:
Should I go with file based or database sessions? Please keep in mind this would be for unregistered users. My apprehension is that I'll end up having lots of records in the database.
Another option seems to be to put the cart contents in an encrypted cookie, but then there's a size limitation on the cookie file.
What would you do in this case ? I would really appreciate your answers.