Who Is the Mystery Shopper Leaving Behind Thousands of Online Shopping Carts? (wsj.com) 97
A Google crawler has been adding products to e-commerce site shopping carts, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. From a write-up: Sellers have been complaining about a serial cart abandoner named, John Smith. Turns out John is a Google bot. A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it built systems to ensure the pricing seen on the product pages is reflected when a user adds a product to the cart. GoogleBot shopping. Google told Search Engine Land in a statement, "We use automated systems to ensure consumers are getting accurate pricing information from our merchants." Sellers that upload their product feeds to Google Merchant Center may not realize it, but they agree to having Google's bots crawl their sites for price verifications when they agree to the Terms of Service. The bot is designed to ensure the price in the feed matches the price on the product page and when the product is added to the cart. The automated system will disapprove items that don't pass pricing verifications. Google is aware that this may cause issues for merchants and owners of e-commerce sites. Google told the WSJ, "This sometimes leads to merchants seeing abandoned carts as a result of our system testing the price displayed matches the price at checkout." That data can mess with e-commerce site owners' abandoned cart metrics, making them look artificially higher than they really are.
Nice idea (Score:1)
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I wonder if they will add e-coins to move them. Perhaps during corona times someone could be paid to e-return them to the line.
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An idea for a new hobby? Leave shopping carts full of crap every time you go to the supermarket, just to be a complete troll... I would never have thunk it (thank heavens)
By the way, if I was a dictatorial tyrant, I would require web crawlers doing this to complete the checkout (and pay), this would amuse me...
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An idea for a new hobby? Leave shopping carts full of crap every time you go to the supermarket, just to be a complete troll... I would never have thunk it (thank heavens)
...
40 years ago I worked in retail. Didn't seem to matter, hardware, clothing, even food stores people take stuff and leave it some place else. Sometimes in another part of the store, sometimes in abandoned shopping carts. They realize they forgot their wallet, things happen like their blood sugar is low, etc. I used to set up carts full of crap to be put back by department and then call them up to get it.
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Re:Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:5, Informative)
No, why? Not until it is paid for. You're taking the attempt to mimic a real store too far.
This is impossible, because, unlike with a real store, there is no meaningful definition of "abandoned" possible — even in theory... Not without some arbitrary timeout.
That could still happen now... Your design simply moves it from "who paid for it first" to "who added it to their cart first". The former benefits the retailer, the latter harms him: at best, he closes the sale later, at worst — never...
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Some kind of window to buy must exist. How long it should be is debatable, but only a very stupid store owner doesn't offer that window. Not having an item may cause someone to leave. Saying you have it and then snatching it out of their cart while they're entering their payment information may cause someone to send you a death threat.
This is more significant with things like buying seats at events and movies, but it can just as easily happen with any highly in demand item, such as a highly sought after gra
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Some kind of window to buy must exist. How long it should be is debatable, but only a very stupid store owner doesn't offer that window. Not having an item may cause someone to leave. Saying you have it and then snatching it out of their cart while they're entering their payment information may cause someone to send you a death threat.
This is more significant with things like buying seats at events and movies, but it can just as easily happen with any highly in demand item, such as a highly sought after graphics card. Also many stores like to implement a "second chance" offer where they'll offer a discount to someone who abandoned a cart. It's more debatable if that is a good idea or not.
If this kind of behaviour pisses store owners off they should display prices with shipping costs right off the bat. Normally, the only way to find out what the shipping costs are of the object you want to buy that costs, say, $20, is to go through the entire ordering process to the point just short of submitting to discover the shipping for that tiny item are $75, and they are still pocketing local sales taxes that should not apply to overseas orders. I suppose they are hoping to entice users into unthinkin
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Guess what? It's the death threat. Some stores might start reserving the items when you click checkout, but items in your cart are free for the taking. If there are only two o
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I request a citation of common storefront attacks, or a best practices article that talks about this topic, or a faq for commonly used cart software that discusses this matter.
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No, why? Not until it is paid for. You're taking the attempt to mimic a real store too far.
No, he is taking the attempt to mimic a real store to the level most customers expect it to be.
This is impossible, because, unlike with a real store, there is no meaningful definition of "abandoned" possible — even in theory... Not without some arbitrary timeout.
Nonsense. An easy way to do it would be to show a countdown timer that tell the user how long until the cart will be auto-emptied. You set the value of that timer to whatever is appropriate for your web store.
If you are running a store that frequently has customers that add stuff over time before checking out the cart, allow them to "save" the cart but with the caveat that items are actually returned to the invent
Re:Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:4, Informative)
So, you call the need for arbitrary timeout "nonsense", and then explain, how to implement the arbitrary timeout...
Given a shortage of the item, a race condition is inevitable — someone will be without however you implement it. My way, you get it, once you pay for it. Your way, someone can hog it — for some arbitrary amount of time — without paying.
Have you never purchased air-tickets online? That is an item which is (was) frequently sold out — and the various implementations all do it the way I describe: it is not yours, until you pay for it. Both the price and the availability may change at any moment.
That you haven't experienced it with goods-retailing web-sites is not because their sites are better, it is simply because shortages are far less frequent with goods (blessed by the Capitalism).
Again, you have a race in there however you do it. My design is simply more fair to all concerned.
From your tone, I sense a "web-developer" with his tail hurting from the critique of his design...
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When I add to cart, I want the item reserved.
You're that customer who thinks they know what they want, but you don't. It would result in no one getting anything because people would just keep adding stuff to their cart as they experiment. I know that I do not treat an eshopping cart the same as a real world one. They are not the same thing. And it is not unfair for someone who added something to their cart to have it removed because someone bought it before them, it is annoying. But it is unfair to everyone if someone who has no intention of buying so
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Have you never purchased air-tickets online? That is an item which is (was) frequently sold out -- and the various implementations all do it the way I describe: it is not yours, until you pay for it. Both the price and the availability may change at any moment.
?? When I purchase air tickets online, even "only 1 seat left" tickets, I've always gotten the impression that the website reserves it in my basket and doesn't let anyone else have it. My evidence is (1) I've never seen price or availability change after I put the ticket in the basket, (2) My vague memory is that I've seen messages which say "if you don't complete this purchase within then it may not be available", (3) My vague memory is that I tried once to purchase a "only a few seats left" ticket, then
Re:Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:4, Informative)
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Again, you have a race in there however you do it. My design is simply more fair to all concerned.
Fair would be the implementation on contract law in a way that doesn't null a contract during an attempt to confirm it. In some countries contract law underpins basic law for sale of goods. There has to be an offer, an acceptance, and consideration (money), and having the same contract closed through someone else between the acceptance and consideration stage almost universally results in a legal battle.
There are also other legal locks in place between acceptance and consideration that make breaking a sale
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There has to be an offer, an acceptance, and consideration (money), and having the same contract closed through someone else between the acceptance and consideration stage almost universally results in a legal battle.
There's a way to hack around this using the legal concept of invitation to treat [wikipedia.org]:
"Our display of prices and quantities available is not an offer but an invitation to treat. You make the offer when you enter payment credentials into the checkout form. To help protect your payment credentials from misuse, we run a fraud check before accepting your offer."
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Again, you have a race in there however you do it. My design is simply more fair to all concerned.
From your tone, I sense a "web-developer" with his tail hurting from the critique of his design...
If your race condition hinges on payment, it means that you might have to reverse a payment which is not something you want to do. The money you reserved from the customer can be withheld for days for them (depending on the payment processors). And will the payment processors still expect fees from you for the transactions?
No, the customer should know BEFORE any money is deducted from them, if those items are available.
And no, I am no "web-developer" (but obviously you aren't either. Furthermore I "sense" y
Re:Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:4, Insightful)
I get where you're coming from, but in reality it can bump up against the facts on the ground.
If you have a limited supply of something, you have to track that at the cart level, or notify the user that their order cannot be completed after the sale. The former is annoying and rife with issues, but the latter means you have to deal with refunds and blowback from the customer. It's far from a solved problem, and why so many developers just give up and put the onus of the work on Magento or whatever.
This issue with Google is pretty annoying, however. If their scraping tool + cart-adder doesn't empty the cart when it's finished, it's broken. I can definitely see a class action suit against Google for this, because they are interfering with the normal operation of the site due to their crappy tool. If sites have to engineer around Google's program acting in bad faith, that's a direct cost imposed by Google ineptitude.
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If you have a limited supply of something, you have to track that at the cart level, or notify the user that their order cannot be completed after the sale. The former is annoying and rife with issues, but the latter means you have to deal with refunds and blowback from the customer. It's far from a solved problem, and why so many developers just give up and put the onus of the work on Magento or whatever.
Thanks for this. I was going to post something similar.
It's interesting to note that some industries oversell their inventory on purpose, with the expectation that some customers will abandon their purchase. The travel industry does it regularly (airlines, hotels, car rentals.) There is a risk of loss of goodwill when people don't flake out as expected, but it can be mitigated by offering discounts, upgrades, bookings with other providers, etc.
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Yes, either "cannot be completed" or "will be delayed". Effective "tracking" being impossible — Google or not [marketplace.org] — this is the only option.
Travel-selling sites, who deal with items in limited supply all the time, show, how to do it. That you do not frequently face this issue with usual retailers is simply because it is far more rare to have a sho
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Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:2)
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Your design simply moves it from "who paid for it first" to "who added it to their cart first"
But with most carts they wouldn't have been able add it to their cart if it's out of stock.
That's why many systems do "take stock off the shelves" when a user adds it to their cart.
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People use online shopping carts as research tools, adding every item that could be a potential purchase, maybe even adding three or four alternatives to bookmark them for easy access, and then removing all but one.
I wouldn't expect the items to be reserved at that phase, not until I actually process the shopping cart with the "process order" button, the one which has a time-sensitive limit. If the item is out of stock, I wouldn't be surprised to be informed about it right at that point - specially if I was
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No, why? Not until it is paid for. You're taking the attempt to mimic a real store too far.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/1731249/mysterious-explosion-and-fire-damage-iranian-nuclear-enrichment-facility#
No, they're not. Some places, such as a photo stores, only have so many cameras/lenses/tripods/whatever available. When you put one in your cart they have to count that as one less available item until/if you remove it from your cart or abandon your cart.
and then restored when the shopping cart is abandoned
This is impossible, because, unlike with a real store, there is no meaningful definition of "abandoned" possible — even in theory... Not without some arbitrary timeout.
See above. If there are five items available and four are already taken, then obviously there is only one item left. However,
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Yes, exactly the situation, my approach avoids...
Funny, you just explained, why this representation is, probably, not accurate...
Which is meaningless, until they receive money for the other items. It can advise would-be buyers, that this item is "hot" (based simply on the amount times it was add
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They absolutely do need to be tracked properly as people take them into their virtual cart, especially for items in low quantity.
Back when online shopping was starting to become a thing and a lot of the quirks had not yet been worked out I tried ordering all the necessary parts to build a new PC. I no longer remember the exact details, but as I recall it turned out the CPU they had listed as coming into stock in less than a week got delayed indefinitely, which became a problem for the order.
I got an almost
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Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:1)
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I come into work today and see legal notice because one listing across 30 of our stores was displaying a price lower than allowed. It should have been set to not display until it went into the cart.
Re:Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:4, Insightful)
If we did that, a competitor could block all of our sales by adding all the units we have available to their cart, or carts if they built a botnet. That is why nothing changes until people put their money where their mouths are. No payment, no change to our database.
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That sounds easily solved. Reserve for accounts with established payment information.
Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:1)
I buy one cheap item once with a throw away PayPal account.
Then I ddos your store.
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I'm fairly sure using one fake account is not how ddos works, but if that's a serious problem in your industry I'd like to know what you sell. Gold plated hookers? Cocaine pressed latinum? ADT?
Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:1)
Did you forget the topic? Putting countless "stuff" in a faked up shopping cart so no one else can buy it if the system is setup to reserve I purchased items. With a single account, I can block all real customers from Buying anything if you run your site based on reserved yet up purchased items. That's the whole point of this thread. I fail to see why my response above is confusing or unclear on this topic.
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Well, there's sanity checks. Or limiting items per customer. Or limiting guaranteed reserved items per customer. Or captchas when one is acting weird. This being a credible scenario seems kind of stupid to me.
Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:1)
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What does a DDoS have to do with this? Did you create a strawman when I mentioned closing one attack vector for our competitors? I didn't say we are not 100% protected against anything.
Re: Shopping carts are poorly implemented (Score:1)
See my comment above to other guy. Same answer as to that guy which is who I was replying to originally.
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No, that wouldn’t work. Products need to be taken “off the shelf” when put in a basket and then restored when the shopping cart is abandoned, otherwise customers will add something to their basket and find it out of stock when they’re ready to pay.
Some sites I've shopped on actually do that. (Newegg.) Well, technically, the item I wanted was still in stock, but between putting it in my cart and going to check-out, Newegg proper had sold out and so they replaced it with one of their third-party sellers, who was offering it for about 30% over MSRP. I decided I didn't want this item that badly.
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In the distant past there have been stories of haxors manipulating stupid websites that stored item quantities and even the price in a client side cookie. Haxor changes said cookie and says woohoo everything is a dollar.
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Clearly you shouldn't trust the client to submit the price. The client submitting a list of things they want to buy is perfectly appropriate.
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Why wouldn't you rather store that data on your end than send it in a cookie? You can always send the session credentials in a cookie, but you'd better back it up with a form value JIC there's some cookie fuckery, whether intentional or not.
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If you store the contents of my shopping cart every time I sign in, that gives me the ability to spam your database. If I was persistent enough, I could probably use it for a DOS attack. At the very least I can be a PITA by leaving cached shopping carts all over.
There's a good reason not to store it yourself, and no good reason not to let the client store it.
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If you store the contents of my shopping cart every time I sign in, that gives me the ability to spam your database. If I was persistent enough, I could probably use it for a DOS attack. At the very least I can be a PITA by leaving cached shopping carts all over.
But if it's tied to a login, then I can invalidate that login. Enough malicious logins from one domain, and I can invalidate the domain. And there's only one shopping cart per login. It's the not-logged-in users that can leave carts "all over".
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Instead, evidently, what most sites store in a cookie, is a reference — reference to a table in their database.
Any decent web dev would have a used cron job or other mechanism to clean out dormant entries after a cart has been abandoned for a period of time.
This would be handled even more aggressively in the case of "guest checkout" scenarios where the user don't have to be logged in as an account holder (which I'm guessing is what Google was doing, but maybe not).
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What "period of time"? How do you define it — and why bother?
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What "period of time"? How do you define it — and why bother?
1) Whatever period the site owner feels is appropriate. Could be an hour, could be 2 weeks, could be 5 years.
2) Why bother? To mitigate the very problem we're discussing- having dead/ghost rows in the database.
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Consider the corp's perspective. A customer added something to their shopping cart. You have 2 choices: have that choice/decision easily disappear when they logout or switch devices/browsers (and potentially lose a sale), or... keep it persistent in case they logged in using another computer and want to continue shopping.
Most corps opt for: make it easy to add stuff to shopping cart, and ensure it's a conscious (and often elaborate) effort to remove stuff from it.
Then there's the whole data mining aspect of
Now that everyone knows that this annoys merchants (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Now that everyone knows that this annoys mercha (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Now that everyone knows that this annoys mercha (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually abandon the cart when I go to the checkout and it requires me to create an account just to see the shipping cost.
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I usually abandon the cart when I go to the checkout and it requires me to create an account just to see the shipping cost.
^THIS! Coercing people to do that is unethical. All they need is a zip code to tell how much S&H costs with be. AND they can still use zip codes to game the system - like charging people a bit more for things based upon where they live. A friend does that for a very large online retailer.
I can never remember the name...Nile.com...no, Mississippi.com...no Congo.com...nope....hold on....yellow.com..nah....
Sorry, I cannot remember.
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Yes yes and yes.
This bullshit usually makes me close the browser and go elsewhere.
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I do this 100% of the time. Solid principle. If the entire price hasn't been disclosed, I disclose nothing, for I couldn't possibly be presumed to have made a purchasing decision yet.
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Ditto.
Re: Now that everyone knows that this annoys merch (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ll also do this to check shipping costs. Iâ(TM)ve been hit with shipping costs being more than the item or excessively high.
Many merchants seem to feel that customers only care about the purchase price, when in reality it is the total price a care about. I have seen cases where a $5 item with a $30 shipping price!?
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expect a lot of people to deliberately do it.
I would expect very few people to do it because not everyone is a raging arsehole who just exists to make others miserable.
Necessary evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Though it causes them problems, the problems are far less impactful than being on the front page of reddit under the image "This piece-of-shit retailer claims the book is $12 but when you add it to the cart it's suddenly $20 excluding shipping!", or getting hit with a false advertising lawsuit/investigation.
Google should make sure their carts get cleared out ASAP though.
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I have to agree honestly. The callout/harassment culture that infests the site destroyed it.
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necessary evil? why does google get to use bots to scan others, but I'm not allowed to use bots to scan google?
evil is in fact not necessary, find another word.
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Because either (1) you agreed to it in the terms of service for the Google Merchant Center or (2) you're not affected. You always have the option to (3) LEAVE.
Read the damn summary.
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You all done missed it. This was done by a robot, an internet program designed to log onto a sellers page and place an order, whilst monitoring all site labels and outputs. The log in with a robot bit, so how the fuck did google get past recaptcha, clearly they have hacked it, no recaptcha for you when a Google ROBOT comes a knocking, bend over and take it. So google AI and forum chat robots pushing propaganda with a backdoor straight through recaptcha, you all don't see that as a bit off.
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I done missed nothing. "Sellers that upload their product feeds to Google Merchant Center may not realize it, but they agree to having Google's bots crawl their sites for price verifications when they agree to the Terms of Service." You done missed that.
And Google runs Recaptcha, genius. That's how "they got past it." No hacking required, especially when they agree to having Google's bots crawl their sites for price vertifiations when they sign up to be listed on Google Shopping.
I
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Did you try asking google's permission? Did they give it to you?
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If retailers, especially in countries with weak consumer laws, did not chronically and ubiquitously lie about prices on their website by excluding taxes or in other ways then they wouldn't have this problem. They brought this upon themselves.
lame (Score:1)
so that is why tickets sell out in 30 sec and you (Score:2)
so that is why tickets sell out in 30 sec and you need to play the reload game to get them when the cart expires
That data can mess with e-commerce site (Score:2)
Google's too lazy to avoid digital littering? (Score:4, Interesting)
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So, their programmers are just too lazy...
Or saving Google how much computing power by not doing something that provides no tangible benefit?
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So, their programmers are just too lazy to add a "remove the item(s) from the carts before virtually walking away" routine after their "add the items to the cart and check the prices" step?
Who cares that an anonymous shopper left a cart and didn't return?
Sounds to me like the shopping site is too lazy to learn what an expiration date is or how to use them.
If they'd empty the virtual carts at the end of the verification to clean up their messes, it seems like that'd solve the problem and still let Google suck up the information they're looking for.
No it wouldn't solve the problem. The problem is fraudulent shopping sites lying about their pricing.
Emptying the cart has no effect on the problem. Adding things to a cart very much has an effect, it proves when the stores are lying to us.
You seem awfully invested in Google, and in turn us shoppers, from having this information. Why?
Why
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It's not a problem, let alone a problem needing solved.
If your shopping site is reporting purchases that haven't been purchased and that is throwing off your inventory, fix your website.
Surprised, it was google (Score:2)
OMG (Score:2)
We are the GOOGLE - resistance is futile. (Score:1)
Google knows these actions maybe causing problems but, hey, "We're Google" so ... FU!
Gee, thanks Google (Score:2)
An open admission (Score:2)
Sellers that upload their product feeds to Google Merchant Center may not realize it, but they agree to having Google's bots crawl their sites for price verifications when they agree to the Terms of Service.
This is an open admission that they put stuff in the Terms and Services expecting the users to not know what they're agreeing to.
Guess it's impossible then (Score:2)
Google is aware that this may cause issues for merchants and owners of e-commerce sites.
I would think if their bot can add items to a cart it can take them out too. But if Google, one of the highest valued tech companies can't do it, then I guess it's just beyond humanity's capabilities.
it's not what you think (Score:1)
A lot of commenters assume that this bothers the sellers because it causes the product in question to be unavailable for other buyers.
That's not at all what the sellers are worried about. They're worried about their abandoned cart metrics which is part of their voodoo pseudo-science marketing. In other words, they're worried that their sketchy invented statistics may be impacted by sketchy invented data. Half of marketing executives jobs is justifying to the company why their services should be retained
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