Re: Shopping Cart Schema - Sessions

JB wrote: > > I also forgot to mention. I am leaning towards using GET to send the session > ids. Many people have told me that customer penatration decreases, some Which people? What facts do they have to support their claims? Is this a bigger problem than distrust in credit card security? Is it a bigger problem than poorly designed shops where people never finalizes their deals? > times significantly, when requiring cookies to use the cart. How would this > have an effect on my script? i will have to call the sessid in all of my > links, correct? That is done automatically by PHP 4.x when using the correct settings, but I can't remember them. There might even be a method for asserting if a user digs cookies or not, and thus based on that set the correct run time status. What I really wanted to pounce on was the customer penetration mentioned. Does anyone have numbers/research on the following: How many don't like to use credit cards on line? How many turn off cookies? How many fear cookies? I feel that for the majority of people cookies are not an issue, probably due to lack of knowledge, or an attitude that it serves a purpose. If your shop is aimed towards fringe groups (like geeks) that sceptic group might be large. If your shop aims at the general population I'm pretty sure that most leave their cookies on because it makes their webmail easier to use, their accounts at amazon easier to use, etc. When in doubt, follow the stream... Check out this, Amazon uses cookies, Amazon does a lot of business. Do you really feel that Amazon misses out on a lot of customers? Do you know of any large websites doing shopping carts which doesn't rely on cookies? Finally the biggest obstacle might be credit card usage (lots of negative hype) or product cost, who wants to use cc for really cheap stuff? Even more finally, sorry that I can't shore up my thoughts with any good facts either, I just felt like questioning the statement since I feel that it isn't neccessary the full truth. -- Paul K Egell-Johnsen Utvikler/PR Manager eZ systems as http://ez.no/