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 tra

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.