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I once encountered a shopping cart with a 5 minute timer. Didn't matter what you added, once you put something in your cart a banner with a clock showed up and

I once encountered a shopping cart with a 5 minute timer. Didn't matter what you added, once you put something in your cart a banner with a clock showed up and started ticking. I was going to spend more on accessories than the base item, but once I saw what they were doing I paid a few % more elsewhere.

KozmoNau7 5y ago
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society recently put a 10-minute cart timer on their website, and I'm perfectly fine with that. For those who don't know SMWS, they're basically an independent bottler under the guise of a club. Everything they bottle is cask strength, non-chill filtered and natural color, which is how I think all whisky should be. You pay a yearly membership fee, which gives you access to regular tastings and other events, as well as access to buy bottles. Their sort of trademark thing is that they don't officially tell you which distilleries the bottles come from, so bottles are marked with a numerical code for the distillery and one for the specific cask. That means they can sometimes get casks from distilleries that are not too keen on having their name on independent bottlings, but the official reason given is that SMWS wants people to taste any given bottle free of preconceived ideas of what a whisky from any certain distillery "should" taste like. Of course, there are readily available lists mapping codes to distilleries all over the web, but the official pretense is kept up. Coming back to the shopping cart, the 10 minute timer is there because they may only have 5 or 10 bottles of a given whisky, so adding it to your cart reserves one bottle for you, until you complete the order or the timer runs out. For limited-stock merchandise, I think that's a sensible way to ensure you don't get an annoying surprise right as you're trying to pay, and to ensure that people can't just reserve a bottle forever and never actually buy it.
- vneur 5y ago
  It would be great if hacker news could find a way to filter out advertisements... seems like they are getting more and more common?
  - dang 5y ago
    What evidence do you have for saying that? The commenter's history looks normal and the comment was relevant. Plenty of HN users go on about their enthusiasms. That's a good thing, as long as they don't do it excessively, which this user isn't. HN's guidelines ask people not to post insinuations about this kind of thing. Internet users are massively too quick to read it into other users' posts, and it poisons the threads when they cross into accusing others. Of course, if you're seeing actual evidence of abuse, that's different, and you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. Someone simply having different opinions or tastes than you is not evidence of abuse, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    How is this an ad, rather than someone just providing an anecdote that is relevant to the conversation? OP surely is a bad advertiser if that is their company, considering they've been posting on hn for 4 years and this is the first time they've mentioned it. 2.25 years ago they said generally that whisky was an interest of theirs on a comment. That's it though.
  - KozmoNau7 5y ago
    I veered into an explanation, because I wanted to provide context for why there is a limited supply and why I consider cart timers to be fair and good practice in such a situation, unlike when they are used as a pressure tactic. As another posted stated, if I were trying to advertise, I'm obviously not very good at it, my only connection with SMWS is that I'm a member and that I probably spend way too much money on whisky :-)
jandrese 5y ago
Ticketmaster does this and it's really annoying because they then want you to type in all of your personal information while a clock is ticking away in the corner. The event isn't for 6 goddamn months, you can give me more than 10 minutes to type in my entire life history that you demand for no good reason!
twobitshifter 5y ago
The timer may be to deal with inventory issues. A denial of inventory attack exploits a site that uses carts to calculated available inventory. Sites which track item availability need to reserve the item for the customer when it is added to the cart. If it’s not, the item may not exist when they checkout. Usually this works fine as only a small percentage of stock is floated in inventory, but if someone wants to take your store down, they can add many items to their cart that they never intend to buy and leave it indefinitely. If you don’t periodically empty unused carts it will create a problem. It’s possible that the site you visited kept a very small inventory and was suffering from these issues even without it being an attack.

KozmoNau7 5y ago

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society recently put a 10-minute cart timer on their website, and I'm perfectly fine with that. For those who don't know SMWS, they're basically an independent bottler under the guise of a club. Everything they bottle is cask strength, non-chill filtered and natural color, which is how I think all whisky should be. You pay a yearly membership fee, which gives you access to regular tastings and other events, as well as access to buy bottles. Their sort of trademark thing is that they don't officially tell you which distilleries the bottles come from, so bottles are marked with a numerical code for the distillery and one for the specific cask. That means they can sometimes get casks from distilleries that are not too keen on having their name on independent bottlings, but the official reason given is that SMWS wants people to taste any given bottle free of preconceived ideas of what a whisky from any certain distillery "should" taste like. Of course, there are readily available lists mapping codes to distilleries all over the web, but the official pretense is kept up. Coming back to the shopping cart, the 10 minute timer is there because they may only have 5 or 10 bottles of a given whisky, so adding it to your cart reserves one bottle for you, until you complete the order or the timer runs out. For limited-stock merchandise, I think that's a sensible way to ensure you don't get an annoying surprise right as you're trying to pay, and to ensure that people can't just reserve a bottle forever and never actually buy it.

vneur 5y ago
It would be great if hacker news could find a way to filter out advertisements... seems like they are getting more and more common?
- dang 5y ago
  What evidence do you have for saying that? The commenter's history looks normal and the comment was relevant. Plenty of HN users go on about their enthusiasms. That's a good thing, as long as they don't do it excessively, which this user isn't. HN's guidelines ask people not to post insinuations about this kind of thing. Internet users are massively too quick to read it into other users' posts, and it poisons the threads when they cross into accusing others. Of course, if you're seeing actual evidence of abuse, that's different, and you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. Someone simply having different opinions or tastes than you is not evidence of abuse, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  How is this an ad, rather than someone just providing an anecdote that is relevant to the conversation? OP surely is a bad advertiser if that is their company, considering they've been posting on hn for 4 years and this is the first time they've mentioned it. 2.25 years ago they said generally that whisky was an interest of theirs on a comment. That's it though.
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  I veered into an explanation, because I wanted to provide context for why there is a limited supply and why I consider cart timers to be fair and good practice in such a situation, unlike when they are used as a pressure tactic. As another posted stated, if I were trying to advertise, I'm obviously not very good at it, my only connection with SMWS is that I'm a member and that I probably spend way too much money on whisky :-)

jandrese 5y ago

Ticketmaster does this and it's really annoying because they then want you to type in all of your personal information while a clock is ticking away in the corner. The event isn't for 6 goddamn months, you can give me more than 10 minutes to type in my entire life history that you demand for no good reason!

twobitshifter 5y ago

The timer may be to deal with inventory issues. A denial of inventory attack exploits a site that uses carts to calculated available inventory. Sites which track item availability need to reserve the item for the customer when it is added to the cart. If it’s not, the item may not exist when they checkout. Usually this works fine as only a small percentage of stock is floated in inventory, but if someone wants to take your store down, they can add many items to their cart that they never intend to buy and leave it indefinitely. If you don’t periodically empty unused carts it will create a problem. It’s possible that the site you visited kept a very small inventory and was suffering from these issues even without it being an attack.