Having the shopping cart in the sidebar or elsewhere on the page is very useful for your visitors. However, displaying the shopping cart when the user has nothing in it is not necessary. To hide the cart in the sidebar, try the following steps. 1. Open: app/design/frontend/default/<your template>/template/checkout/cart/sidebar.phtml 2. Look for the following div (normally on line 32): <code><div class=”box base-mini mini-cart”></code> Add this php code right before that opening div tag $_cartQty1 = $this->getSummaryCount() Add this php code to the bottom of the file endif