In Ubercart, can I make a "View Cart" link appear only when an item is in the user's cart?
Create a block with your "View Cart" html code then set block visisbility to "Pages on which this PHP code returns TRUE (experts only)" with the following:

&lt;?php
$items = uc_cart_get_contents();
if (count($items) &gt; 0) {
  return true;
}
return false;
?&gt;