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" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 >
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