On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:24, Jay Blanchard wrote: > [snip] > ...ton's o thoughts > [/snip] > > I am making an assumption that you are using sessions for your shoppers. > If this is the case then the cart would be abandoned if/when the session > expires. If you are not using sessions then I think 24 hours would be on > the longish side of acceptable. > > In another thread on another list I pointed out to another person > designing a cart that the items in the cart are removed from inventory > while they are in the cart even though no check-out has occured. If the > cart is abandoned I want to return those items to the shelf as quickly > as possible, making them available for other shoppers. A lot of folks > get this wrong IMHO...they do not remove the item from inventory when it > is placed in the cart, they do it at check-out. This could cause > concerns if the items in question are popular.
I wouold just leave the items on the shelf until the cart has been checked out. If the item becomes unavailable the checkout code can inform the user. This way you maximize the chance your product gets sold. This is also the way the online grocer I use works, except they allow you to authorize them to do an automatic substitution with something almost equivalent... so maybe 2 litres of milk instead of 4. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
