Weirdness at Amazon.com

[Kent Multer]

Hi folks --

My Mom just complained to me about a problem she was having at Amazon.com. I figured she just pushed the wrong button or something; but I tried it at my own computer, and got a similar result. I went to Amazon and put an item in my basket, and then found another item in the basket as well. It was a completely different product, something I looked at back in January, but didn't buy. Here it is, back in my basket 8 months later, without any action on my part.

Have any of you seen this? Is Amazon nuts? All over the country, hasty shoppers are ending up with merchandise they didn't want, because Amazon is pushing stuff to them that they looked at months before.

Just wondering ...

[d_host]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

Do not adjust your TV set. Everything is fine. Amazon has extremely long basket timeout (1 year? maybe longer?). You can accomplish the same thing with Miva Merchant, and in fact if you search for basket expiry - you'll find many storeowners who have been asking for this for as long as Miva forums and mailing lists have been around. Some people like it, some hate it. Those who like it will argue it makes sense. You may argue it doesn't and it's "pushing stuff" you don't need. You just can't win - there is no perfect answer to this.

[wcw]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

I don't think you'd be able to delete expired baskets and pack if you had a one year timeout and were using mivasql.

[d_host]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

Depends on the store. If you have 10-100 visitors a day - that wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you are running Amazon.com and have a few million visitors a day - yes, that wouldn't work too well.

[wcw]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

I had over 2600 baskets today. Most of those were search engines. That would be a million baskets in one year. I don't think it could purge that file for just the expired baskets and then pack.

[d_host]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

You want web bots to spider your site, yes, but do you really need to let them add products to the cart and generate thousands of useless baskets all day, every day? Probably not. You can prevent bots from using POST in forms, which in effect will disable the option for bots to create all those 2600 baskets, and leave just the few from real, human visitors. Problem solved.

[wcw]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

Not true. None of those baskets had anything in them. Every page that a bot visits creates a brand new basket. That is done as it follows http links in your store (nothing to do with forms). You cannot prevent that unless you block the bot from indexing your site. If it hits a page, a new basket is created. That happens because there is no cookie so merchant sees every hit by them as a new customer.

[d_host]

Re: Weirdness at Amazon.com

Ah, I assumed we were talking about baskets that had actual content in them, hence the ability to come back in a few months later and still see your basket having items in it (like on Amazon.com). But even in this case, there are still things you can do - in both v4.x and v5.x stores. You can use Merchant Optimizer to generate a static catalog of all your store pages, and a few .htaccess rewrites to keep people (and bots) to browse only the static catalog. Then explicitly prevent bots from spidering your /Merchant2 or /mm5 directory and prevent them from using the POST method in forms so they can't follow the 'add to basket' or 'buy one now' buttons on static pages. This should seriously cut down on the number of (empty) baskets in your store.