Re: how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

Of course, this makes problems when you're adding promotional product to the cart, which should have a seperate price. Add to this that the customer may have special pricing (think Business to Business). So you have to have an update mechanism for promotions and the extra price lists. Do-able, but it can get hairy. Robert Cummings wrote:

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:22, Eric Wood wrote:

Chris W. Parker wrote:

Now what do we do? Does the program automatically delete the carts after a certain (definable) period of time, i.e. 7 days? OR do we allow the merchant to manually delete the carts at any point they want? And how do you determine your abandoned cart rate? That is, do

Well, you don't what item to linger too long as prices change. If a user add something to their cart and comes back days later, there may be a different price or the item may have been discontinued, etc.. So you user may end up getting the wrong price unless you have checkout logic to correct pricing. I say, if an incomplete cart hasn't been touched more than 2 hours *and* you do cleanup processing at 3:00am, then that'll be safe enough, especially if you have few international orders. -Eric Wood

Since the shopping cart hasn't been checked out, couldn't the shopping cart just keep track of inventory IDs and quantity, and finalize price at checkout time. Thus the prices would be up-to-date even if the user returned 5 months later. This could also handle products no longer carried, since hte ID would become invalid and it could automatically be removed form the shopping cart when the user reconnects. Chances are after 5 months they don't remember what they ordered anyways. Cheers, Rob.