ItsGeekToMe.co

Riding in the car the other night, Spouse Peripheral asked me “If I’m on an Internet shopping site on my computer, and I put items in my shopping cart but don’t check out, how come when I go to the same site later on my iPhone, my shopping cart is empty?”   Well, to me that question demonstrates just how vast the information gap can be between a Geek and a non-Geek, because to me the answer was so obvious that I wasn’t even sure I understood the question at first, and to her, she just couldn’t understand why items she had picked out and carefully placed in her virtual shopping cart would be gone just because she used a different computer to look for them.  The answer seemed like information that might be of value to some of my readers out there, so here goes.

In order to be sure I was answering correctly, I had to ask one question:  when she was shopping, did she have to sign in to the website she was using, or did she wait until checkout to sign in?  The answer was that she waited until checkout, and therein lay the issue.  From SP’s perspective, it was one site, and she is used to the site recognizing her when she visits.  From the site’s perspective, SP is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of users who shop there at any given time.  Since she didn’t sign in before starting her shopping, she was basically shopping anonymously.  The site generated a shopping cart for her, which it kept track of by placing a session cookie in her browser.  This allowed her to virtually add merchandise, and to use the cart on that one computer.  When she later visited the site on her iPhone (which could just as easily been any other computer) she didn’t sign in there either, and since the site didn’t know who she was, it assigned her a new (and empty) anonymous shopping cart.  To make matters worse, it’s possible that if she went back to her computer that her original shopping cart would also be empty.  Why?  Because the website has to remember every one of these anonymous carts, and each one uses resources on the site’s server.  If the site retained every anonymous cart indefinitely, it would eventually run out of space to hold them all.  Long before that happened, the site would slow way down, because instead of having to search through a few hundred, or a few thousand computer records to find a given cart, it would have to search through countless millions of records.  Multiply that by some number of transactions per second, and that’s a lot of wasted computing power!  So, shopping sites typically put a time limit on how long an idle cart can remain active, and they delete the cart and its contents after that period.

So, how do you avoid problems like these?  Well, not all shopping sites are the same, so the answer varies (you didn’t expect a simple straight-up answer, did you?).  Worst case, the answer is “you can’t, so finish up and check-out before you walk away.”  Some sites allow you to save your shopping cart, but you must be signed in to do so, otherwise the system won’t know who the cart belongs to, and it certainly won’t recognize it as belonging to you when you link from a different computer.  One way that Spouse Peripheral herself suggested was to add the items to her wish list instead of her shopping cart.  While technically correct, that would still require her to sign in, or the wish list would be anonymous just like the shopping cart!