5 ms·

Is abandoning a cart really rude behavior? I sometimes do it just to see if they'll spam me as a test of if I want to do business with a site.

jawns 6y ago
It's not rude at a consumer level, where (in general) you're at least considering making the purchase. It's arguably rude at a bot level, depending on the frequency, where there is 0% chance of conversion.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  The entire purpose of the bot is to provide listings to consumers who are looking to buy. If it was consumer journalist doing it to get the price for a news article (in a for-profit publication) about the product, would it be “rude”? If not, how is it for Google bot?
  - jsnell 6y ago
    Because bots will do it at a much larger scale than individual humans. The first law of web robotics applies here: the bot should not harm the website it's crawling, or through inaction allow it to come to harm. I didn't read the article due to the paywall, but I assume that the problem is that the problem is that these goods are reserved for that (non)-customer until the shopping cart times out? That is directly costing the merchant money, either in lost sales or having to maintain extra inventory. So yeah, that bot really should have been programmed to end the session with an empty basket one way or another.
rubyron 6y ago
An abandoned cart reminder email sent a few hours later has a ridiculously high conversion rate - around 15% in my experience. Online vendors aren’t going to stop that practice, especially when the big e-commerce platforms make it easy to do.
- barnabee 6y ago
  Reason enough that they should be illegal or at least strictly and specifically opt in, not as part of general marketing consent. If a customer really wants or needs something they’ll go back and buy it. The world doesn’t need the excess consumption of people psychologically manipulated into buying stuff they weren’t going to.

jawns 6y ago

It's not rude at a consumer level, where (in general) you're at least considering making the purchase. It's arguably rude at a bot level, depending on the frequency, where there is 0% chance of conversion.

dragonwriter 6y ago
The entire purpose of the bot is to provide listings to consumers who are looking to buy. If it was consumer journalist doing it to get the price for a news article (in a for-profit publication) about the product, would it be “rude”? If not, how is it for Google bot?
- jsnell 6y ago
  Because bots will do it at a much larger scale than individual humans. The first law of web robotics applies here: the bot should not harm the website it's crawling, or through inaction allow it to come to harm. I didn't read the article due to the paywall, but I assume that the problem is that the problem is that these goods are reserved for that (non)-customer until the shopping cart times out? That is directly costing the merchant money, either in lost sales or having to maintain extra inventory. So yeah, that bot really should have been programmed to end the session with an empty basket one way or another.

rubyron 6y ago

An abandoned cart reminder email sent a few hours later has a ridiculously high conversion rate - around 15% in my experience. Online vendors aren’t going to stop that practice, especially when the big e-commerce platforms make it easy to do.

barnabee 6y ago
Reason enough that they should be illegal or at least strictly and specifically opt in, not as part of general marketing consent. If a customer really wants or needs something they’ll go back and buy it. The world doesn’t need the excess consumption of people psychologically manipulated into buying stuff they weren’t going to.