In the provided PHP code examples, what improvements or modifications could be made to enhance the security and efficiency of the shopping cart functionality?

Issue: One improvement to enhance security and efficiency in the shopping cart functionality is to sanitize and validate user input to prevent SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Code snippet for sanitizing and validating user input:

// Sanitize and validate user input
function sanitize_input($input) {
    $input = trim($input);
    $input = stripslashes($input);
    $input = htmlspecialchars($input);
    return $input;
}

// Example usage
$product_name = sanitize_input($_POST['product_name']);