Dan -
I think you've come across the biggest issue - public access computers
and session tracking. I don't think there's a really good way to trap
for that - but it might be a site-user and your-client education
opportunity: only allow saved carts for registered users. It's easy
enough using your logic to take a cart from a non-logged-in user and
save it once they sign in or sign up - but I think it would need to be
within a single browsing session. This does a couple of things - it
keeps you from having to store a lot of stuff that may never be
retrieved, but also provides incentive for site users to create an
account. This in turn generates much more meaningful marketing data on
potential customers even before they actually buy anything. When a
company is footing the bill for creating and maintaining a website, it's
a small price to as the site user to 'pay' (sign up for an account -
just keep the process simple and short!) for the convenience of having
their cart preserved. I think that when put into that context
(explaining the return on investment (or lack thereof)) you may find
that your client is pretty happy with the solution you've already
created. I think that's certainly on par with what other major shopping
sites do.
Good luck with it-
Jason
Jason Pamental
Director of Web Services
North Sails
Office: 401.643.1415
Fax: 401.643.1420
Mobile: 401.743.4406
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dan Stein wrote:
Cart Conundrum
I am building a cart system for a client who wants people to be able to add
items to a cart and have the cart saved even if they don¹t login. To buy
anything they ultimately will have to sign up and be logged in.
We came up with this bit of logic, which works well to a point
When they come to a site we set a visitor ID cookie and then as they add
things to their cart we insert that visitor ID. Once they log in we loop
through any cart items with that visitor ID and add in their customer ID.
So now they come back but from a different browser. There is not much we can
do here. They get assigned another visitor ID and the cart is empty. But as
soon as they log in we are able to add their customer ID and reset the visor
ID cookie to match the other browser so now we have consolidated their cart.
This works really nicely.
But, as I thought about the users and what they might do. I realized this
would fail or at least get really confused if the user logs in from a public
computer like a library.
So I need to rethink this and I wonder how other people are handling this.
I am open and interested in hearing peoples thoughts and how they deal with
this issue.
It seems it would make a useful thread.
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