Building a shopping cart requires managing shared state across multiple components — the cart icon in the header, the product page, and the checkout summary all need access to the same cart data. As the creator of CoreUI with 25 years of front-end development experience, I’ve implemented cart systems for numerous e-commerce projects and the most maintainable solution uses React Context with useReducer for predictable state updates. This avoids prop drilling and keeps cart logic centralized and testable. Once the cart context is set up, any component in the tree can read or update the cart with a simple hook.

Managing complex state with multiple actions and transitions can become unwieldy with useState. As the creator of CoreUI with over 11 years of React development experience, I use useReducer for sophisticated state management in complex UI components. The useReducer hook provides predictable state updates through a reducer function, similar to Redux but built into React.