"An open letter to miniatures e-commerce sites (long)" Topic

I am tired, so very tired, of e-commerce sites that empty my "cart" after a short period of inactivity.

This week I'm piecing together a purchase to supplement my current painting/crafting project, and as usual, I can't get everything I want from one web site. Yesterday I narrowed my focus down to 3 sites and spent a lot of time bouncing between them, gathering a gestalt order. Late in the day, before I had hit the big red "launch" button, one of the sites emptied my cart. The other two web sites I'd settled on still have all of the items in my carts, almost 20 hours later. Now my choices are:

1. painfully reconstruct the missing parts of the order in the auto-clearing cart (this time with the pressure of a clock ticking in the back of my head!);
   
2. modify the entire project so I can stop shopping and get the rest of my life moving;
   
3. give up the project altogether.

None of those options is attractive. Why do I even have to make this decision?

I don't necessarily blame specific miniatures businesses for this issue. At this late stage, two decades after the advent of e-commerce, all SAAS and off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions should make it easy for the portal owner to adjust cart timeouts, but I admit that even as a professional server and network administrator I'm not that intimately familiar with the state of the e-commerce industry, so it's entirely possible e-commerce is still a perfect mess, and extending the shopping cart timeout may still be hard to do. Nonetheless, it's important that it is extended. Probably more important than having photos of everything. :-)

Business analysts estimate that roughly 2/3 of e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned with no sale (avg. 60-70% over the last decade). There's no reason to keep an abandoned shopping cart full, and emptying it saves server side resources and helps maintain sanity in sales statistics. Very few businesses are rich or important enough to run a permanently persistent cart system like Amazon (my own Amazon cart has pages of items, and some have been there for years!). A permanent shopping cart is actually pretty easy to implement if the web site has a customer login system, but such a system has extra technical overhead and therefore extra cost and extra management issues. I don't blame anyone for not implementing one of these.

It's also not so easy to determine when a shopping cart is "abandoned" and when it's just awaiting an out-of-band decision (money, space, time, permission, whatever). The products and price scale make a difference. Shoppers buying a new home appliance, redecorating a bedroom, and replenishing bathroom supplies all have very different decision cycle periods. Many web sites report a significant percentage of shoppers spend days or even weeks revisiting the web site and adjusting their carts before clicking the "buy" button. Probably not 2/3, but often 1/4 or more.

Miniatures shoppers frequently take weeks or even months to decide to go forward with a project. My back-of-the-envelope SWAG suggests that the keepalive period for a miniatures e-commerce site shopping cart should be at least 24 hours, 72 hours would be better, and if possible 8 days or 15 days would be much better still. Here's why:

• If the gamer keeps coming back to add/remove/adjust items every day, every couple days, or even once a week, the project is still a possible sale.
  
• If the gamer doesn't revisit the cart weekly or even once a fortnight, the decision is probably wedged and the project is in danger of abandonment. Even if it's not abandoned, it's probably under serious reconsideration after 7-10 days of inactivity.
  
• Most people are paid 2-4 times a month. Ideally a shopping cart should persist until after the next paycheck is deposited, in that golden period before the customer remembers all the bills and the "flush with cash" feeling fades.
  
• A few hours (or less!) is almost certainly a bad timeout period. Many, many online shoppers poke at their favorite shopping sites during breaks at work, and anecdotally our hobby sounds no different. The time between breaks at work can be hours, or even a full work day. A cart filled in the (local) morning that sits inactive for most of the business day is not necessarily abandoned, or even if the cart is filled after work and re-examined the following evening. If it's automatically emptied out in a few hours, though, the potential for a spontaneous impulse purchase evaporates with the contents.

The specific technical requirements for a persistent shopping cart vary with web site implementation details, so it's impossible to suggest a panacea. Suffice it to say that cart timeouts equate to some lost sales, and some customer frustration. A business owner just has to pick the spot on the sliding scale between "impulse sales" at one end and "web site costs" at the other, but a persistent shopping cart should be in the specs for nearly every e-commerce site.

Miniatures e-commerce businesses are not high volume on the scale of Internet commerce sites. The technical requirements for running a miniatures business web portal will typically be low in an objective sense (on a scale from Amazon to VogonPoetry.com). It might even be possible for many of them to keep shopping carts alive in main memory (the easiest technical solution to implement, the most lavish to maintain) for weeks at a time without significant impact. That will vary per web portal.

If any web business owners have deliberately decided to keep a short cart timeout, I'd be very interested to hear why.

- Ix

Did it take you as long to write that as it would to have repopulated your cart?

I must admit I've never come across one that has emptied my cart.

I would suspect the average miniatures web site uses off the shelf software and uses the default settings. I've been around for a decade and this is the FIRST time I've ever heard/seen this raised. I myself have never used a shopping cart his way – seems like a very very hard way to do it. That is what Excel is for.

But what the heck, I'll see if I can figure out how to set the duration on my shopping cart.

Incidentally, I know many shopping carts do allow you to build "wish lists" but you usually need to register with the site to do that…

Paper and pen/pencil. Figure up what you want, then go buy it.

Just looked. With osCommerce for "guests" the default is 24 minutes. To change ot you have to actually go under the hood into the actual *.php files and change a value in a line of code. You can not just log in to your "dashboard" and change it.

There was a lot of (old) discussion about how if a cart session is left open then your items may appear in the cart for the next person?

Did it take you as long to write that as it would to have repopulated your cart?

LOL! Longer, I'm sure.

- Ix

I myself have never used a shopping cart his way – seems like a very very hard way to do it. That is what Excel is for.

I use spreadsheets for big, serious projects and vendors who have no shopping cart system. For little, impulse buys spreadsheets are decidedly anti-impulse, nor are they conveniently pre-populated with the pictures, descriptions, part numbers, prices, price changes since my last order, new products, shipping calculations, etc. ad nauseum.

Just looked. With osCommerce for "guests" the default is 24 minutes. To change ot you have to actually go under the hood into the actual *.php files and change a value in a line of code. You can not just log in to your "dashboard" and change it.

Meh. Too hard. This is the kind of reason I reserve judgement on actual small businesses. It should never be the job of a shop owner to redo the work of techies.

There was a lot of (old) discussion about how if a cart session is left open then your items may appear in the cart for the next person?

Now, that's just effin' scary. Will it include the shipping address or payment info if that was entered?

BTW, thanks for looking. I'm glad someone with an actual storefront is interested.

- Ix

Amazon seems to have overcome this hurdle….. the technology is out there!

I have lots of part filled carts around but that is because I have to fill them up to find out what the postage would be, then realise it's more than the mini's and leave the whole thing.

Spreadsheets?
SPREADSHEETS?????

I like shops with a wishlist for this reason

Amazon seems to have overcome this hurdle

Amazon spends more on its IT department than the total sales of almost all the miniature manufacturers combined. Their system is totally proprietary and not for sale to other e-traders.

What a strange way to buy things.

It's called the Internet. You may have heard of it. :-)

- Ix

@Dust Warrior:

Beware! Many shops – like mine – drop in a plug shipping cost based on dollar value. But in fact I only charge you what the post office charges me. So if you buy a $3.00 USD flag sheet the shopping cart will say $8.95 USD shipping. But I'll only charge you for a stamp.

And before you ask, NO, there is no way to get it to calculate. You have to weigh and measure every item, and update it, and then update when the USPS changes costs.

I love permanent wishlists.

I hate self-emptying after 2 hours cart.

I don't think ours self empties for registered customers. I have stuff that is still in my cart months later. I use it as a sort of live wish list when I'm figuring things out

Not sure about guests accounts though, but yea for most wargames manufacturers (who are not particularly tech minded) it will be off the shelf software and whatever the default setting it

Some web sites give you the option of keeping your cart live for a period, usually a few weeks or a month, but ticking a box and giving the cart a 'name' so you can retrieve it. Oxbow books (David Brown in the USA)have this for instance, I have no idea what server side software they use.

Maybe we could get some of the online store owners who have some sort of persistent cart to say what they use so others could consider shifting? I also have a bad feeling that a lot of web hosting services may demand you use their preferred software (which they would get a fee for) rather than your preferred and easily configurable package.

I can't say this has ever caused a problem for me.

Some people obviously take this hobby a lot more seriously than I do! I've never used a spreadsheet in my life!

When I want stuff I go to a website and buy it. If I want stuff from a different website, I go to that one and buy it.

If I want a lot of stuff I'll use a pen and a bit of paper to work it out first. Then I'll go online and buy it. Simple!

But then, I'm a very low-tech kind of bloke. I can do a lot of stuff faster the old fashioned way rather than using modern technology! (As an example, when we need to find out where an address is at work, the others pull out their phones. I pull out an A-Z map book. Guess who finds the place first….)

I am tired, so very tired, of e-commerce sites that empty my "cart" after a short period of inactivity.

You see, there's this wonderful piece of technology that can really help in this situation.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
It's callad a pencil and a piece of paper ….

Our shopping cart empties, but I do not run a login system on it. As the extra admin of the needed Data Registration (in the UK if you store details electronically you have to tell the gov you do so) and fees etc, and the fact I don't want to do a mailing list or have customers personal data stored means it is more work than reward.

It never occurred to me that my shopping cart items would place a "hold" on stock items. I assumed it was checked once you hit "submit" to get to the verify stage??

Odd if true.

I don't use other people's sites to store my info. I keep a list of things I want or need. From there I can make a shopping list for going to a convention or compare options for placing online/phone/mail orders.

I prefer to keep the info "in house" incase a site crashes, upgrades, changes servers, or even goes out of business. I don't populate business site's shopping carts until I actually place my order. The example in the OP is just one more reason for me to continue with the method that works for me.

GeoffQRF said:

I don't think ours self empties for registered customers.

It doesn't. I've never tested the time limit, but I can say that I've had a cart open at totalsystemscenic.com all week and it still has everything I put in there.

- Ix

You see, there's this wonderful piece of technology that can really help in this situation.
.
It's callad a pencil and a piece of paper

Whooooosh

Why not write up your list (spreadsheet or paper), and call your order in by phone, or e-mail, if the cart is problematic? You could share your problems with the vendor in question, in the same communication. Cheers!

I don't need suggestions, I have plenty of my own workarounds. The OP was not a cry for help.

The issue of overzealous self-emptying shopping carts is not unique to our hobby, it's a very common problem with Internet shopping sites. By now it's also a well-known technical issue that has been resolved many times in many different ways, and mostly persists among small businesses with little or no technical resources. The first step to resolving it is being made aware of it. Thus, an open letter.

- Ix

I have this issue with Paizo.com There cart clears every 3 minutes and I can't add more then 1-2 items before its empty again. no idea how they can sell anything through there. I just gave up trying.

Yes Winston, Excel Spreadsheets. Very handy!
I've not had this happen. On some websites weeks later my cart is still populated.

Mine is at least a month or more. And while I have the ability to clear it I rarely do.

Just note, that at the lower end of commerce hosting sites there may be a restriction on the amount of space the baskets use or the host may have the limit set so that the performance of the webstore is not affected. Obviously, unless you are paying for a dedicated or semi-dedicated webstore server (hundreds of dollars a month at the minimum) then your store can be one of hundreds on the same server so the admins are controlling these values for performance reasons across all the stores on that server.

In my experience, both with BrigadeGames (16 years) and industry experience (25+), generally, the lower the cost for the monthly use, the less control you would have over the important things in the webstore like bandwidth and ways to fine tune performance. So, yes, the old adage is true and you get what you pay for. Based on my experience over 16 years finding a good cart that does almost everything and a good host isn't easy or cheap. Finding the right balance of cost, features, speed, bandwidth and support is a challenge.

Second is that some customers do not enter their email address. Many systems track by email address/login information and that makes the process much smoother. Without knowing who you are a system can not always recognize you when you return. Turning off tracking in some modern browsers and mobile devices will affect this as well.

Third, some customers think that moving from their work computer to their home computer while not logged into the site will allow their baskets to be carried forward to the other computer (they do not.)

The commerce field is very fragmented and there are too many inconsistencies and incompatibilities between front end software (webstore) and back end systems (accounting, ERP, CRM, etc.) If you want them to work seamlessly, well generally that takes a lot of money to make that happen.

I don't see many wargaming vendors on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Brigade games makes a very valid point concerning various sites and their structure. How about checking the sites first and then "writing down what you need from each site. THEN going to each site and putting the order(s) in. Sounds like you are doing this process "back asswards: as they would say. I do this all the time and it works. Maybe the problem is not so much the sites but how you are going about it.

LOL! There's nothing "back asswards" about putting things in a shopping cart and then waiting a little while before clicking "buy". Millions of online sales are made using some variation of this.

On the other hand, how is it not "back asswards" to copy all the data out of the web site into out of band storage (paper, spreadsheet, text file, whatever)? As I mentioned previously, I do resort to spreadsheets sometimes, for big projects or for antiquated web sites that don't have a proper shopping cart. I don't think I've ever resorted to pencil and paper, but then I don't saddle up the horse when the "check engine" light comes on in the car, either.

I think this is the salient point from BrigadeGames' post, and echoes my own experience in other parts of tech:

The commerce field is very fragmented and there are too many inconsistencies and incompatibilities between front end software (webstore) and back end systems (accounting, ERP, CRM, etc.) If you want them to work seamlessly, well generally that takes a lot of money to make that happen.

Theoretically, the best workaround should be to login to the shopping site, because technologically it's easier to implement a saved cart with a login system. This does work for me on many sites, but unfortunately some sites even auto-clear these.

- Ix

To reiterate Yellow Admiral's point as well as my own –

"Second is that some customers do not enter their email address. Many systems track by email address/login information and that makes the process much smoother. Without knowing who you are a system can not always recognize you when you return. Turning off tracking in some modern browsers and mobile devices will affect this as well."

So, if you want a tracked cart, create and account and log in. Or at least go through the checkout process to where you put in your email and proceed to th next step so the information is sent to the webstore server. Having your email address is the only way a cart will recognize you on your return. Some systems (like mine) will even remind you about that cart with items in it.

These settings are to a great extent controlled by service providers. Most of us miniatures vendors do not own our server banks. We buy our services from companies that provide web commerce for small business owners. It takes years to master all the settings. The fact is that most of us are one man operations working a real job and doing this on the side. Amazon has the money and staff to do whatever they want. I have no such resources. If I can figure out what switch to turn on or off to make that work, then I do so. But, it is not just a matter of deciding to change the site. I am a miniatures guy, not a web developer.