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

Why not just maintain carts for users with accounts and maintain them indefinately. Users with out accounts can have there carts stored in a session and will become invalid when the session expires. --- "Chris W. Parker" <cparker@swatgear.com> wrote: > Hey there everyone. > > I haven't had time much to work on my cart program > recently but I was > just thinking about abandoned carts and can't figure > something out > completely. > > How do you determine if a shopping cart has been > abandoned or not? > > What I am thinking is that when the customer adds an > item to their cart > an entry is made in a db table. That means a cart is > created, and that's > about as far as I get. ;P > > Actually that's not totally true, so let me > continue. > > The only reason I can think of to determine if a > cart has been abandoned > or not would be based on how old the shopping cart > is. That is, when it > was last modified (had a product > added/modified/deleted from it). But > who's the say that the customer that created that > cart is not going to > come back to the site at some point and then > checkout? > > So then we have to decide how long an unmodified > cart is considered > abandoned as opposed to active. Let's make that time > 1 day (24-hours). > > Now let's imagine that there are four abandoned > carts in the database. > 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 > I take a survey of > the db evey week to see how many abandoned carts I > have and then average > those results? > > The problem I see is that a cart could be considered > abandoned for 4 > days but then become active again because the > customer has come back to > it and has added more products to it. In this case > I'd say it was never > abandoned in the first place and in which case it > would be innacurate to > include it your abandoned cart total. > > WHAT TO DO? > > A BIT CONFUSED I AM! > > > > Thanks, > Chris. > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/