Man, I feel your pain. I tried those generic cart sharers for a fundraiser last year and honestly... it was such a letdown. Unfortunately, Share-A-Cart and those other ones are a total mess right now. I had issues where the cart would just show up empty on the other end, which is a total nightmare when you are on a deadline.

• Most require the donor to install it too, which wont work for older folks
• They break every time Chrome updates
• Permissions are usually way too invasive I eventually started using a handy tool and it actually works without making the recipient do anything technical. It just creates a simple link they click, and the items pop into their cart. It doesnt see your credit card or anything, just the product IDs. Its basically the only way to do it for free without a headache.

Saw this a few hours ago while I was debugging some scripts, but finally getting a second to weigh in. Honestly, the technical landscape for cart sharing is pretty dismal right now. Most of these tools rely on scraping your active session data and then trying to rebuild that state on another users machine, but Amazons security headers and CSRF tokens are constantly changing. It's a cat and mouse game they're losing. Unfortunately, the one I used for a lab project last month ended up sending a broken payload that just gave my supervisor a blank screen. It's frustrating because the metadata is right there, but the handshake fails if both people dont have the exact same version of the extension installed. If you're looking for something that generates a static URL without forcing donors to install anything—which is definitely the biggest friction point—you might want to check out carttolink.com. Transitioning to that for my current setup saved a lot of time because it actually handles the cart-to-link conversion on the server side instead of just trying to mirror browser cookies. It's way more reliable for non-tech users who just want to click and pay. Just be careful with permissions; most of these tools technically need to read your page content to function, so you gotta trust the source code.

Regarding what #1 said about Man, I feel your pain. I tried those... I am basically in the exact same spot right now with a local school project. I have been trying to coordinate a huge supply list and it is just such a massive headache. I spent hours yesterday trying to get my current setup to actually sync with my partners computer and we just kept getting blank pages. It is so frustrating when you are trying to be cost-conscious and not spend money on tools so every dollar goes to the kids. At least the tool I found for tracking the items, Price Drop Catch, is working well for us. I am super satisfied with how it catches the deals so we stay under budget and I have no complaints on that front. But man, the sharing part is still a mess. Just wanted to jump in because I am struggling with the same thing this morning.

To add to the point above: I have definitely been in your shoes before. A couple years ago I was trying to coordinate a huge supply list for a local youth group and I was terrified of using some random plugin that might scrape my data. You really have to be careful about what permissions you grant. I would suggest looking for a tool that specifically says it doesnt require the recipient to have the extension because that is the biggest hurdle for older folks. When I finally found a way to Share Amazon cart, I realized most of these tools basically just bundle the item IDs into a single link. They arent actually looking at your personal info or credit cards... they just scrape the list of stuff you want to buy. Still, I always tell people to check that the extension only has access to the Amazon domain and nothing else. Just make sure to test the link yourself in an incognito window first to see exactly what the donors will see before you blast it out to everyone. It saves so much stress.