Keeping things in the shopping cart

How long?

[hannamyluv]

okay, when you place an item in your cart at Amazon and you come back the next day. It's still there.

How many of you use this sort of feature? How long do you set the cookies that track this?

If you don't use it, is there some reason (other than just havn't got around to it) that you don't use it?

[SkyDog]

I can't think of any reason not to do this. The benefit I could see is that when a visitor that doesn't buy or make it all the way through the checkout process, their chosen merchandise would be readily available when they return to the site in the future. I think with amazon, though, it doesn't store anonymous shoppers carts indefinately, but does when the items are placed in the cart under your user account.

[kosar]

we use this feature, it allows the customer to keep items in their cart for seven days

[jweighell]

I used to store cart contents in cookies although I recieved a few emails from people saying that they couldn't add items to their cart. It turned out that they had cookies disabled in their browsers.

Now I've moved to store cart contents in my database, so now I do clear this out periodically.

I'm wondering who I am alienating more, the people without cookies or the people that return later to find their cart empty.