Save Items in Cart

Is there a way to save the items you have in your cart?

Let's say that you have placed an item in the cart, you complete the order - get to the Paypal page
and then remember that you did not place and order for another item!
In returning to the cart from Paypal - the cart then becomes empty. I know - in Paypal you are cancelling the order.
But based on the above scenario - is there a fix?

Not really.
When you are at paypal step (or whichever else payment system), the "job" of the RTD is already done.
this was done to avoid possible loss of data: infact, even if the customer will not pay, you will receive the email about the order as the order is stored.
For this reason is not possible to go back to previous cart: simply because at that point the order is already placed.

In such a scenario I guess the user would probably go back to designer to create/order the item he forgot.
I assume the only difference in terms of pricing would be the shipping fee.
The customer would probably pay again, or contact you because he do not want to pay double shipping: in both case I guess you would simply refund him the 2nd shipping cost.

I am not a shop, but I am a customer. It happened to me too to order stuffs online and forgetting one AFTER placing an order. Getting in touch with the company is the usual way to solve the issue, I guess

Understood . . . when you get to payment screen order is "submitted". I have a related observation. But what about before payment screen? This scenario happens fairly often . . .

Customer isn't signed in or maybe even hasn't created an account. They have 5 designs in the cart. They did a lot of work to get these designs done. While in the checkout process . . . something happens. Shipping isn't working. Credit Card page isn't loading. Need to pause and check some info's with other parties before proceeding. Can't find credit card. Oops where do we want to ship this order to? Oh, we need to check those names before buying this . . . you get the idea. It surely happens. Hopefully we're open and they will call and ask what to do.

Customers only recourse is to close cart and . . .

1) try again later (hopefully they don't quit the browsing session, thus losing it all) or
2) register/login and save the designs one at a time into saved designs to load later into the cart.

Either of these wouldn't be intuitive to customer and are laborious solutions.

What would be ideal is a Save Order button of sorts in the cart that perhaps presented the Register/Login screen and had the ability to save all designs at one moment into Saved Designs or ideally Saved Cart items with the designs and options chosen.

From our experience, this would be a huge step forward in servicing customers. Things often happen while customer is in the cart.

Thanks cos for your input.

Exactly what I know will happen in our case.

Our Client has 140 Franchisees and we won't be open 24 hours - 7 days a week. Nor are we all in the same time zone.

Your scenario is exactly what I see happening to us. With the added and dreaded phone calls and nasty emails to the
Client which in turn will come right back to us!

Most carts in the online shopping world have the ability to save what is in the cart.

Thinking out loud . . .

A Submit for Quote saves the order details and sends to us. Add another feature to the cart titled "Save Cart for Later" which is essentially same as Submit for Quote, except customer has ability to retrieve and pay later. Perhaps admins get a notification of Saved Cart Order which we could choose to act upon or not.

If there was a link in the External Cart feature something like "Load Pending Order" or something . . . wow, how easy for customers to view cart, sign in, retrieve the order and pay directly from our sites.

This could be an interesting feature.
I guess it could be possible, at admin side, to generate a "pay page" for saved orders.
This would mean the ability of creating a page for users where they can pay a "submit for quote" order online, in some way.

As the main point here would (possibly!) be to avoid adding more confusion on your (admin) end, I would see such orders being saved as "on hold", until confirmed in some way we'll have to determine.

However, I do not have the feeling thous would be all that's required: such a solution would really submit something to you, rather than "storing" user designs. Seems another possible way could be to work around the current "save design" feature.
It should be possible to create a command that will move or copy all cart entries into user's saved design. At that point, in case the user is not logged in, he would be informed that by registering he could save those designs permanently.

Just to try defining steps, it could be like this:

1) have a new command in cart named "save your cart contents". You could write there somehting to tell users that using it could be useful to have the designs saved for any possible future purpose

2) when clicking that, all designs found in cart would be saved. Not options and quantities, but designs would.
If user is logged in, designs would simply be added to his current list. If not, he would be prompted for logging in or registering, with the usual text already present in the saved designs area telling them registering would save designs even over the current session

With something like this done, even in case everything crashes, designs would be retrievable. For the session only if not logged in, forever otherwise.
Such a solution would avoid you to receive temporary and unconfirmed orders (saving doesn't mean the customer will SURELY buy), while allowing an extra level of security against designs-loss.

Thoughts/comments/extra ideas?

HEY, RIGHT!
Last post of Cos was posted while I was posting mine, so I read it later.

What if....
Using as a base the solution i proposed in previous post, but adding internally (at my side) a flag to determine if a saved design is really a saved design or a design "saved from cart"?
With such a flag, if any flagged design is found it could be possible to show an extra command somewhere telling users "You have pending order designs: click here to reimport them in cart"

The only change against the previous proposal would be to have 2 new commands: one if you want to save cart designs as saved designs, and one to save as "pending orders". This 2nd option would really work far better if the user is logged in, though. Well, let's keep brainstorming

Alex,

I like the idea of "save as pending order".

The whole concept would be to allow a customer to save what is in the cart before check out so that if there
was a problem - where ever it came from, the items would still be in the cart and they would not have to start
over as cos stated in his previous post!

Yes Alex last post sounds about right. As long as we can do our own thing with labels, icons and css should work.

Don't forget about the external cart. Also a link to pop up in the login links would be useful.

Will probably need to re-read this later on when not so busy during the day.

This is going to be good.

Just a ping to say this is now on my TODO list.
Need to complete some other tasks b4 this, but the idea is surely interesting

Awesome!

Don't mind me when I Ping you back to remind you.

I'll not.
You have no right of bothering me: you have the DUTY of doing so!
Aren't we a super-nice community?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2012 11:05PM by Alex.

PING!

I have stayed out of the forum for a while now - I know I was driving you all crazy!

BUT - PING!!!!!!

PONG!

That's fine, that's fine!
I confirm this is in the TODO list. I have a very busy schedule, and it's hard to determine what to do first...
So I'm doing anything, even if a little slower
But I promise you'll like almost every single piece of the new upcoming feature (including the one about this thread), they're all so exciting!

Alex, I've been chatting with my designer about this because we have had instances of items being lost from the cart, he says we need a way of using external notifications (easy xtm script maybe?) for us to notify RTD that the checkout has happened on our site and then RTD can clear the cart. Until then the cart should not be cleared, that way if the customer heads off to do other things on our site and then clicks the view cart button later on all their info will still be there.

Andy

Andy,

This may sounds slightly complex, but depends....
Just to be sure, what you're talking about would be a flow like this?

1) customers adds item(s) to cart
2) customer submit the order through RTD
3) cart is NOT cleared evenif the order has been sent
4) cart is cleared when a notification from you is received in some way

I for one don't understand Andy's post the way it is written, even after reading several readings.

"for us to notify RTD that the checkout has happened on our site and then RTD can clear the cart."
Isn't that what RTD does already?

"Until then the cart should not be cleared, that way if the customer heads off to do other things on our site and then clicks the view cart button later on all their info will still be there. "
If customer has items in their cart and heads off to do other things on your site, or any site and then clicks the view cart button later, all that info SHOULD be there. This is currently normal behavior.

If an order has been fully submitted (thank you page appears) the cart is cleared and company is notified.

If an order has been placed into the cart, it doesn't dissappear UNLESS the browser session is quit (which is the only explanation for items lost from the cart?).

That last line is what this entire thread is about. The ability to retain contents of the cart for later full submission even after the browser session has ended. If that is the scenario you are referring to, Andy, then I guess we are almost there. Will be great addition!

Ok sorry for the confusion. Maybe I have a different problem to what you are referring to in this thread. I'll try to explain what's happening and then see if that fits into the proposed solution. If it turns out to be a separate issue I can start a new thread.

To clarify something before we start tough, is there a difference between the cart and the cart module? If so then there may be a setting or something that I have wrong and that's why it's not working.

So here's the current flow. (same browser session)

1. Customer designs something and adds it to their cart
2. Customer click the "products" link and is taken back to select and design a second product
3. Customer decides "no I don't need this 2nd product really" so clicks the "view cart" button (I should add here that the view cart button I have on my site links to the embedded cart module)
4. Customer is taken back to cart view but now it is empty, their first item that they had put into it originally is no longer there.

So that's what I find is happening. Like I said maybe it's something to do with cart and cart module being separate, I don't really know. If RTD does currently hold the cart then perhaps there is no need for us to communicate back but it just appears that right now if the cart page is closed before entire checkout has happened it erases the contents.

Hopefully I'm a little clearer this time around.

Andy

External and internal should be same cart I think. Have you tested viewing the cart using internal and external cart in the same browser session without browsing away?

Might seem silly to ask, but could you possibly be changing to a different browser somehow when accessing external cart? Perhaps your default browser is different that where you added to cart?

Cos ir right, external and internal are the same cart. Just few layout changes based on the source, but very same script.
It uses sessions to see what's in the cart, so it should not be cleared at all unless:
a) the session expires (which means more than 24 hours without activity from the same browser)
b) order is submitted
c) a different browser is used

Infact, if you normally add an item to cart from designer, when you visit the external cart the very same item should be there.
Dunno, perhaps it may be some security thing happening because of the implementation of the external cart?
Everything could be possible, but if this is happening on your setup, some link of the page showing the external cart would help.
As usual, I'd need to see the issue happening in order to consider it... an issue

Thanks for your input on this Cos, I'm sure it's all one browser and one session, even all in the same tab.

That said.....

Strange thing is yesterday both myself and our designer could recreate this problem time and time again on three different computers in three different locations, in both Firefox and Chrome (we didn't test IE or Safari).

However I just went to recreate it again today so I could post some screen captures here and it's working just as it should. I tried multiple times and everything seems fine (keeping the same browser session obviously).

I don't think my designer has changed anything overnight so unless Alex has been busy working his magic we may have to chalk this one up to internet gremlins!

Andy

Thanks Alex, looks like you posted while I was writing a reply. I'll keep an eye on it and try to get screen captures if it happens again.

Andy

Really, I changed nothing related to sessions and cart in these days.
SuperMysticalMagicalPshycoPowers?

Hi Alex, have you had a chance to think any further on this?

I finally figured out that the problem I had that I could keep re-creating over and over again was exactly the scenario that Premier had mentioned about in the first post. People deciding while at the final stages of checkout in Paypal to go back and add another product.

I re-read through all the posts here to familiarize myself and have a couple of thoughts.

I really like the idea of the "saving the cart" feature and "flagging" the saved designs so that the system can remind people they have pending products to checkout.

The only concern I have with that is, unless I miss-understand where the save cart option would be, by the time the customer gets to the Paypal (or any other payment screen) they would be past the option to save the cart and it has already been emptied. Thinking back to the original problem of a customer going back to add a second product from the Paypal screen, unless for some reason they thought to select the save cart option earlier in the checkout, they would still loose all their designs.

If that is the case, is there any way to auto-enable that feature by default rather than have it as an action the customer must take?

Andy

Hi Andy,

not many new thoughts so far, because we're facing a somehow related (but very mysterious yet) issue.
It seems that sometimes shipping is not calculated by the system, and that's happening in the same steps discussed in this thread.

Long story short, the issue could be cuased by temporary slowdowns and/or browser related issues with javascript and/or session handling. Being very rare it's extremely hard to debug as impossible to replicate.
At this point, I'm trying to think at something at a very global level: the feature we're discussing here could become also a new internal default method for RTD to store all relevant data. Doing so, even the chances of other issues related to session/server/broswer issues should be reduced a lot.

At the end this means I'd better think at a much bigger plan, as we're talking about rewriting entirely the way cart things are stored and passed to payment gateways. It may take sometime, but before making a single move I 'll need to define very clearly what to do. Being all related and integrated, such a matter is not something that can be done in small chunks, unfortunately.

Ok Alex thanks for the update, good luck with your bug hunting!

This post is really long and ended up in a totally different direction than first intended, so I would like to bump the original part of this to current.

Happens too often that customers think their cart contents (especially time consuming designs) are safe in the cart. Just got off the phone with a disappointed customer who lost 20 designs over night. I admit, our fault for not implementing a warning. Should have done that a long time ago.

So, I think the original conversation ended with Alex about halfway through this thread:

"PONG!

That's fine, that's fine!
I confirm this is in the TODO list. I have a very busy schedule, and it's hard to determine what to do first...
So I'm doing anything, even if a little slower tongue sticking out smiley
But I promise you'll like almost every single piece of the new upcoming feature (including the one about this thread), they're all so exciting!"

Question: are you talking about the ability of have cart items not-expiring for registered users (which was the new direction we discussed here or somewhere else), or the generic fact of being able to store cart contents... somewhere?