Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-11 Thread Daniel Guerrier
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.
 
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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-11 Thread Chris W. Parker
Daniel Guerrier mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 11, 2003 9:08 AM said:

 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.

Not a bad idea, in fact I think I like it (as it's been suggested
before). I will probably use it for the rewrite.



Chris.
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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-05 Thread Jay Blanchard
[snip]
 Of course, now you have to deal with putting inventory back on the 
 shelf when the session expiresand you have no way of knowing when 
 that would happen unless you're storing *something*.

A good point, if that's the way he wants to do things...

In which case, SC needs to be stored SOMEWHERE (DB), and a cron job 
garbage cleanout could take place every 1/15/30/60 minutes to remove 
SC's without matching sessions, or something similar.
[/snip]

How about a session identified limbo table?

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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-05 Thread David T-G
Chris, et al --

...and then Chris W. Parker said...
% 
% Hey there everyone.

Hiya!


% 
...
% How do you determine if a shopping cart has been abandoned or not?
...
% 
% 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.

If you go with the ideas of keeping the cart in a session (and not
decrementing the stock until purchase time) then it's easy; when the
session goes away the cart does and it's abandoned.  Have a simple table
of all carts created or even a counter of carts and reference that
against completed carts to get your ratio.

If you go with the ideas of storing the cart in the DB, then either
implement the simple table above for your count as carts get deleted
or just add an 'abandoned' field and keep the cart forever or perhaps
combine the two and note old carts that are due to be wiped as such and
include that analysis in the math against the cart_total_count table.


HTH  HAND

:-D
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(play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * society and not sufficient moral courage.
(work) [EMAIL PROTECTED]  -- Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-05 Thread David T-G
Chris, et al --

...and then Chris W. Parker said...
% 
...
% 
% Would it be too complicated to say 5 in inventory, 2 of those are in
% customer shopping carts? Or something along those lines?

I shouldn't think so; it would be a bit of extra work, but not a big
deal.  If you did, then I'd have a notice somewhere that an item in an
old cart might get sold out from under the buyer (especially if there's
any real or implied guarantee of availability).

I would imagine that Amazon, from another example, has at least this
level or perhaps even doesn't note the stock as gone.  Surely it would
kill them if I ordered 432 copies of my buddy's book, waited until they
said that they had stock again, and then repeated the process.


% 
% Chris.
% 
% p.s. Does anyone know of any mailing lists that deal with e-commerce and
% shopping cart design (code/implementation/logic/etc.)???

I don't, but if you find one I'd be interested.


HTH  HAND

:-D
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(play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * society and not sufficient moral courage.
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[PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Chris W. Parker
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.

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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Anas Mughal
This looks like a business decision.
Your business anaylist could help answer your question.


Chris W. Parker 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.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Richard Davey
Hello Chris,

Thursday, December 4, 2003, 9:09:57 PM, you wrote:

CWP The problem I see is that a cart could be considered abandoned for 4
CWP days but then become active again because the customer has come back to
CWP it and has added more products to it. In this case I'd say it was never
CWP abandoned in the first place and in which case it would be innacurate to
CWP include it your abandoned cart total.

Not that it answers all of your questions - but Amazon persist your
shopping basket for AGES. Infact I do wonder if it ever times out,
I've known them last a few months before.

Mind you - that's because they knew who I was.

You ought to group your baskets into anonymous and owned. Keep the
owned ones for weeks, if not months, and the anonymous ones shorter.
1 week at the most?

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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Eric Wood
Chris W. Parker wrote:
 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

Well, you don't what item to linger too long as prices change.  If a user
add something to their cart and comes back days later, there may be a
different price or the item may have been discontinued, etc..  So you user
may end up getting the wrong price unless you have checkout logic to correct
pricing.

I say, if an incomplete cart hasn't been touched more than 2 hours *and* you
do cleanup processing at 3:00am, then that'll be safe enough, especially if
you have few international orders.
-Eric Wood

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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Jay Blanchard
[snip]
...ton's o thoughts
[/snip]

I am making an assumption that you are using sessions for your shoppers.
If this is the case then the cart would be abandoned if/when the session
expires. If you are not using sessions then I think 24 hours would be on
the longish side of acceptable. 

In another thread on another list I pointed out to another person
designing a cart that the items in the cart are removed from inventory
while they are in the cart even though no check-out has occured. If the
cart is abandoned I want to return those items to the shelf as quickly
as possible, making them available for other shoppers. A lot of folks
get this wrong IMHO...they do not remove the item from inventory when it
is placed in the cart, they do it at check-out. This could cause
concerns if the items in question are popular.

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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Robert Cummings
On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:22, Eric Wood wrote:
 Chris W. Parker wrote:
  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
 
 Well, you don't what item to linger too long as prices change.  If a user
 add something to their cart and comes back days later, there may be a
 different price or the item may have been discontinued, etc..  So you user
 may end up getting the wrong price unless you have checkout logic to correct
 pricing.
 
 I say, if an incomplete cart hasn't been touched more than 2 hours *and* you
 do cleanup processing at 3:00am, then that'll be safe enough, especially if
 you have few international orders.
 -Eric Wood

Since the shopping cart hasn't been checked out, couldn't the shopping
cart just keep track of inventory IDs and quantity, and finalize price
at checkout time. Thus the prices would be up-to-date even if the user
returned 5 months later. This could also handle products no longer
carried, since hte ID would become invalid and it could automatically be
removed form the shopping cart when the user reconnects. Chances are
after 5 months they don't remember what they ordered anyways.

Cheers,
Rob.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Justin French
On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 08:09  AM, Chris W. Parker wrote:

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
Well, I'd have SESSION based shopping carts, rather than DB based carts 
(even though the session may be DB powered).  To my way of thinking, if 
a user abandons their session, then they abandon their shopping cart -- 
just like if I leave my shopping cart in isle three and walk out of the 
supermarket.

However, for logged in, registered members, I'd have options to:

- autosave a shopping cart (i'd store it indefinitely -- until the user 
is deleted, or perhaps a year)
- save a SC for later

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).
If you owned a grocery store, you'd have to decide how long you'd leave 
an abandoned cart in isle 3 --  5 minutes? a week?  This is entirely a 
decision up to you and your client.  If you have 1000's of orders every 
hour, obviously storing every abandoned cart for a year is not an 
option.  Why couldn't it just be a configurable option in the app?

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?
Run a cron job once a day (or once an hour if the site has enough 
traffic to warrant it) clearing out abandoned order (that you 
determined about would be delete-able after a hour/day/week/year).  The 
cron job should take note of how many were deleted, so that you can 
establish statistics.

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.
I personally would trash the cart with the session (sessions are 
cleaned up by PHP automatically), but let the logged in user auto-save 
or manually-save the cart for a later date.  Next time they log-in, the 
cart gets loaded from the DB, prices and availability get updated, and 
the user can continue.

Justin French

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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Chris W. Parker
Anas Mughal mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 1:23 PM said:

 This looks like a business decision.
 Your business anaylist could help answer your question.

Yes, and so far they've all given good ideas.



Thanks.

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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Justin Patrin
Of course, this makes problems when you're adding promotional product to 
the cart, which should have a seperate price. Add to this that the 
customer may have special pricing (think Business to Business). So you 
have to have an update mechanism for promotions and the extra price 
lists. Do-able, but it can get hairy.

Robert Cummings wrote:

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:22, Eric Wood wrote:

Chris W. Parker wrote:

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
Well, you don't what item to linger too long as prices change.  If a user
add something to their cart and comes back days later, there may be a
different price or the item may have been discontinued, etc..  So you user
may end up getting the wrong price unless you have checkout logic to correct
pricing.
I say, if an incomplete cart hasn't been touched more than 2 hours *and* you
do cleanup processing at 3:00am, then that'll be safe enough, especially if
you have few international orders.
-Eric Wood


Since the shopping cart hasn't been checked out, couldn't the shopping
cart just keep track of inventory IDs and quantity, and finalize price
at checkout time. Thus the prices would be up-to-date even if the user
returned 5 months later. This could also handle products no longer
carried, since hte ID would become invalid and it could automatically be
removed form the shopping cart when the user reconnects. Chances are
after 5 months they don't remember what they ordered anyways.
Cheers,
Rob.
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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Chris W. Parker
Jay Blanchard mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 1:25 PM said:

 In another thread on another list I pointed out to another person
 designing a cart that the items in the cart are removed from inventory
 while they are in the cart even though no check-out has occured. If
 the cart is abandoned I want to return those items to the shelf as
 quickly as possible, making them available for other shoppers. A lot
 of folks get this wrong IMHO...they do not remove the item from
 inventory when it is placed in the cart, they do it at check-out.
 This could cause concerns if the items in question are popular.

I brought up this same issue recently with some coworkers and everyone
(except me) thought it would be a good idea to do it at checkout. I took
your approach which is to remove it when the customer takes it off the
shelf so to speak.

Would it be too complicated to say 5 in inventory, 2 of those are in
customer shopping carts? Or something along those lines?



Chris.

p.s. Does anyone know of any mailing lists that deal with e-commerce and
shopping cart design (code/implementation/logic/etc.)???
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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Chris W. Parker
Justin French mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:20 PM said:

 If you owned a grocery store, you'd have to decide how long you'd
 leave an abandoned cart in isle 3 --  5 minutes? a week?  This is
 entirely a decision up to you and your client.

slaps_forehead/

;)

 If you have 1000's of
 orders every hour, obviously storing every abandoned cart for a year
 is not an option.  Why couldn't it just be a configurable option in
 the app?

That is an excellent idea and one that I hadn't thought of.

 I personally would trash the cart with the session (sessions are
 cleaned up by PHP automatically), but let the logged in user auto-save
 or manually-save the cart for a later date.

Yeah the session files are cleaned up automatically but your application
doesn't know that. You'd have to specifically tell your application (via
a cron job??) when the session get cleaned up and that it (the
application) should remove all the old carts.

Is there something I don't know about (very possible!)? I mean, even if
the users session file is deleted, how do you tell the app. to follow
suit and delete it's ASIDE from setting a cron job?



Chris.
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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Robert Cummings
On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:24, Jay Blanchard wrote:
 [snip]
 ...ton's o thoughts
 [/snip]
 
 I am making an assumption that you are using sessions for your shoppers.
 If this is the case then the cart would be abandoned if/when the session
 expires. If you are not using sessions then I think 24 hours would be on
 the longish side of acceptable. 
 
 In another thread on another list I pointed out to another person
 designing a cart that the items in the cart are removed from inventory
 while they are in the cart even though no check-out has occured. If the
 cart is abandoned I want to return those items to the shelf as quickly
 as possible, making them available for other shoppers. A lot of folks
 get this wrong IMHO...they do not remove the item from inventory when it
 is placed in the cart, they do it at check-out. This could cause
 concerns if the items in question are popular.

I wouold just leave the items on the shelf until the cart has been
checked out. If the item becomes unavailable the checkout code can
inform the user. This way you maximize the chance your product gets
sold. This is also the way the online grocer I use works, except they
allow you to authorize them to do an automatic substitution with
something almost equivalent... so maybe 2 litres of milk instead of 4.

Cheers,
Rob.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Justin French
On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 09:35  AM, Chris W. Parker wrote:

Yeah the session files are cleaned up automatically but your 
application
doesn't know that. You'd have to specifically tell your application 
(via
a cron job??) when the session get cleaned up and that it (the
application) should remove all the old carts.

Is there something I don't know about (very possible!)? I mean, even if
the users session file is deleted, how do you tell the app. to follow
suit and delete it's ASIDE from setting a cron job?
Rather than storing the shopping cart in a DB, store the cart in the 
session.  When the session dies, so does the cart.
When/if they choose to save it, it THEN gets ported into a database.

Justin French

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RE: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Chris W. Parker
Justin French mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:48 PM said:

 Rather than storing the shopping cart in a DB, store the cart in the
 session.  When the session dies, so does the cart.
 When/if they choose to save it, it THEN gets ported into a database.

Aaah...! This makes sense.



Thanks,
Chris.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Justin Patrin
Of course, now you have to deal with putting inventory back on the shelf 
when the session expiresand you have no way of knowing when that 
would happen unless you're storing *something*.

Chris W. Parker wrote:

Justin French mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:48 PM said:

Rather than storing the shopping cart in a DB, store the cart in the
session.  When the session dies, so does the cart.
When/if they choose to save it, it THEN gets ported into a database.


Aaah...! This makes sense.



Thanks,
Chris.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Jon Bennett
why not only reduce the stock once a sale has gone through ???

Cheers,

Jon

jon bennett  |  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
new media designer / developer
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On 5 Dec 2003, at 01:09, Justin Patrin wrote:

Of course, now you have to deal with putting inventory back on the 
shelf when the session expiresand you have no way of knowing when 
that would happen unless you're storing *something*.

Chris W. Parker wrote:

Justin French mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:48 PM said:
Rather than storing the shopping cart in a DB, store the cart in the
session.  When the session dies, so does the cart.
When/if they choose to save it, it THEN gets ported into a database.
Aaah...! This makes sense.
Thanks,
Chris.
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Re: [PHP] how to determine if shopping cart has been abandoned?

2003-12-04 Thread Justin French
On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 12:09  PM, Justin Patrin wrote:

Of course, now you have to deal with putting inventory back on the 
shelf when the session expiresand you have no way of knowing when 
that would happen unless you're storing *something*.
A good point, if that's the way he wants to do things...

In which case, SC needs to be stored SOMEWHERE (DB), and a cron job 
garbage cleanout could take place every 1/15/30/60 minutes to remove 
SC's without matching sessions, or something similar.

Justin

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