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
