The text discusses the issue of shopping cart abandonment in e-commerce, which can result in inaccurate inventory management and hinder demand assessment. The average abandonment rate is high, with 70.19% of carts left behind, often because users are just browsing. A potential solution is using row-level TTL (Time to Live) in databases like CockroachDB to automatically delete cart items after a set expiration period, thereby clearing unused items without requiring code changes. The solution is demonstrated through a demo store called RoachMart, where items in a shopping cart are programmed to expire after a specified time. This method not only addresses abandoned carts but also provides a versatile tool for managing data expiration in various applications. The text highlights that the row-level TTL feature is simple to implement with SQL statements and encourages exploring its potential for other use cases.