Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Two exact same orders from the same IP address using the same credit card in less than a second. I would think some software engineer could prevent that from happening. Oh well, I must be giving engineers too much credit.
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It's not as easy as one might think, which is why it happens on so many different websites. While the two orders within a second part is fairly obviously a mistake, what happens if you have two orders within, say, 30 seconds? Is that a mistake, or is it someone in a hurry? You're trying not to delay the person in a hurry (risking
their business) in order to protect the double-clicker from himself. The extremes are fine, but the border is a can of worms, as is deciding where to set that border. Also, if a site is using a canned shopping cart script instead of writing (and supporting) their own, they don't have much control over it, and a lot of vendors do just that.
Generally, it's not a big deal. Someone who accidentally double orders will ask for one of the orders to be canceled, and that solves the entire problem. Having people do that might not be the optimal solution, but it's the easiest. The difference in this case is a buyer who wasn't content for one order to be canceled, as most are, but wanted to get
both orders and only pay for one. And, when Kobo wouldn't do that, she came here and seemingly wanted to use MobileRead as her personal army to make Kobo give her that second order for free (and don't get me started on her mother who wanted two gift cards).
Could the shopping cart have been better written? Yeah, it could have. I've written better myself. But it's one of those things where if you're not writing a cart from scratch (and there is rarely a reason to; we had to because of a client's unusual business model) it's probably reasonable to assume that the user will only click once, and human intervention -- that is, canceling and refunding the rare spurious order -- will take care of the exceptions. Most people are reasonable.