Google crawling cart through checkout... benefits vs negatives?

[cnvi]

I manage a fairly large e-commerce store..

When we add new items to the store, we are fine with the product page being crawled and indexed by Google. This typically happens very quickly.. sometimes within 24 hours of the new item being placed in the store. The e-commerce platform (not sure if I can say the name of it here) is one of the top 10's in use so its got many features.

One of the features of this e-commerce platform shows us uncompleted orders - and every new item gets added to the cart by Google. We see their IP address. They are crawling to checkout which means somehow they are auto clicking add to cart. It has happened to every new item we have added since January.

Has anyone else had this experience with Google spidering into checkout? Are there benefits to this? Is this common?

I know I can block spidering to checkout w robots.txt but not sure I want to do that. Interested in your experiences and what you did about it. thx.

[Robert Charlton]

They are crawling to checkout which means somehow they are auto clicking add to cart.

cnvi, IMO, the main question I'd ask is whether the "artifacts" they are creating by auto-clicking your add-to-cart are in any way changing the user experience or skewing your statistics. And yes, are there any benefits?

It has happened to every new item we have added since January.

For purposes of our discussion, are they continuing to crawl, or is this happening only when you add new items? I'm not sure this would make any difference to your question, but it might affect a point of discussion.

The e-commerce platform (not sure if I can say the name of it here) is one of the top 10's in use so its got many features.

Yes, if it's a well-known, established platform, you may certainly mention it. We are mainly concerned about stopping drive-by spam (which also can skew our discussions and perhaps present misinformation).

[Dimitri]

I do not see any benefit from letting Google craw a cart, it's not going to index it, and it's consuming crawl budget... but may be I am wrong.

[topr8]

>> is one of the top 10's in use so its got many features.

and at least one undesirable feature. no crawler has any business adding items to a cart.
furthermore i imagine this feature is causing other unknown bots to add items to your cart (and not check out) thus your add to cart stats generated by this cart/platform are not that helpful as they are not only measuring real users.

[tangor]

I try to separate biz from info ... a cart is biz and is denied on my commercial sites to any one other than the user!

YMMV

(one never knows what an SE will do with ANY information it can scan/index)