Items left in cart causing problem?

General General Questions
1

Here is a strange behavior:



Say a customer logs into their account, adds items to their cart and then doesn't complete the checkout.



Then the same customer comes back a week (or so) later and now decides to purchase some items. They add times to their cart and begin the checkout process. During checkout they log into their account. Here is the strange part, the cart is automatically updated with the current items in the cart and the ones they left in the cart a week ago. If they are not paying close attention they have no idea more items are now in their cart.



This is causing problems with our customer base.



Anyway to prevent this or at least notify them this has occurred.



Using 3.04 Ultimate.



David

2

David,



You may want to reduce the amount of time items are saved in the cart for this particular site, I believe it is this line within your config.php file



// Sessions storage live time

3

Thanks,



I will look into what we have it set to, but the specific time is not the problem. The problem is the cart's behavior. Merging items into the cart without any notification can't be the best way to do this.



David

4

[quote name=‘Triplets’ timestamp=‘1361899750’ post=‘156427’]

Thanks,



I will look into what we have it set to, but the specific time is not the problem. The problem is the cart’s behavior. Merging items into the cart without any notification can’t be the best way to do this.



David

[/quote]



I guess I view it a bit differently… IMO, if a customer adds an item to the cart, then forgets they did it after a week or two, comes back, adds items to the cart and goes thru the entire checkout process without paying attention to the important details, then sorry, that’s what you ordered! :confused:



But yeah, if I were catering mostly to retail versus b2b, then I might tend to reduce the amount of time items were retained in the cart, just because the average retail purchaser would tend to not be quite as detail oriented as a business professional, may just be me overthinking things as I sometimes do! :-)

5

Instead of the session expiring and the products either staying in the cart, or being removed from the cart, if they were added to the customers wishlist instead. Then you could easily e-mail all customers with items in their wishlist…if only.



Note you will need to alter COOKIE_ALIVE_TIME and SESSION_ALIVE_TIME if you want to extend the length of time customers items can stay in the cart before they log back in.