Quote:
Originally Posted by adamselene
Good shopping cart software deals with the “double-purchase problem” by correctly tracking the session and properly using transactions in the backend database. You would never see such a problem on most big-name ecommerce sites.
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As a professional in that area, I have only two words: I wish.
They're getting better, but "good shopping cart software" and "ecommerce sites" seem to be almost mutually exclusive. There are a lot of ways to deal with the problem, but to date, the usual solution seems to be "tell customers not to do it, then fix it if it happens anyway". Yeah, it's like hanging up a sign in your store saying "our cashier can't count, please use exact change" but there are a lot of companies out there with the shopping cart equivalent of such a sign.
I deal mostly with small businesses, and as bad as the big ones are, the little guys range from bad to worse to mind-blowingly terrifying. It's downright disturbing how many of them are using some sort of "shopping cart" (optimistically so-called) that they -- or rather their nephew's buddy -- got out of the back of some book or off some "FREE! FREE! BONUS DISC!" ten years ago, and doing well to have transactions work at all.
Best practices aren't. There's the way we wish they were (come on, folks, just disabling that button after one click is one line of JS and that'll stop 90% of the users from clicking it twice!) and the way they really are. As much as we wish they were all the way they ought to be, we have to deal with the cold, hard reality of a world where scripts are coded by rent-an-IT-guys who aren't all there and nephews' buddies who aren't old enough to drive, and work accordingly.
And then there's the code that makes it to
Daily WTF. It is to weep.
(and the clients on
Clientcopia, the websites on
Web Pages That Suck, and the people who seem to stay up nights trying to think up new ways to make a grown coder cry)