So I'm currently working on this project for a small furniture studio in London and the client has this specific vision for what they call a duo shopping experience. Basically they want two people—like a couple moving into a new flat—to be able to build a cart together in real-time. I've been digging through the WordPress repository and some premium sites and honestly I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with options that don't quite hit the mark.

I checked out a plugin called Share-A-Cart and another one called WooCommerce Cart Share but they both seem to just generate a link that you email or text to someone else. It's not really a shared live experience, you know? It's more like a snapshot of the cart. My client wants something more dynamic where if person A adds a dining table, person B sees it pop up in their cart view immediately without needing to refresh or click a new link every single time.

Budget-wise I've got about $300 set aside for this specific functionality and I really need to get it wrapped up in the next three weeks before we go live. I saw some dev blogs mentioning using Firebase to sync cart data across sessions but that feels like a massive rabbit hole to go down right before a launch and I'm worried about it breaking the rest of my AJAX functions. I also looked at some wishlist plugins that have sharing features but again, they usually require the second person to manually import the list into their own cart which is just too many steps for the user experience we're aiming for.

Is there any existing tool or maybe a clever way to use a persistent session id that allows two different logged-in users to share the exact same cart instance in WooCommerce? Or am I dreaming and this is something that requires a completely custom headless setup to work properly?