# Checkout

The checkout process is the process that a customer must go through when purchasing the items in their shopping cart. The customer can be either a *guest* — i.e. they proceed by just providing an email address — or *logged* — i.e. they authenticate themselves with a password. When logged in, the customer gains access to their private data, such as their saved addresses and credit cards, making the process faster.

![A sample checkout flow](/files/ZldhVkBNRpEMxtLmbHaC)

This guide will walk you through all the actions that you generally need to implement when building a **custom checkout experience** for your customers. We recommend you to have a look at our [open-source hosted checkout application](https://github.com/commercelayer/commercelayer-react-checkout) for a fully functional, production-ready reference.


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