How can I solve the cart hold issue in my high demand online store?

[GabbyGrace]

I need Shopify to realize that cart hold (or lack thereof) is a REAL issue. I have a high demand store and my items usually sell out within an hour of posting them. My customers are angry that if they add something they REALLY want to their cart and continue shopping, there is a great chance that items have been snatched up by other customers while they were browsing. What ends up happening is that they often have to place several orders in a rat race starting with the item the want the most and keep placing orders hopefully getting everything. That creates an issue of multiple shipping costs for them and a customer service issue (and refunds on shipping) for me. Just like with concert tickets and other sites, websites give you at least 5 to 10 minutes of guarantee that what you put in your cart will still be available when you get to checkout. This issue is costing me customers and causing customer service issues. The Shopify community needs resolution on this. It has been far too long that this has been a complaint without a change. 

[JoesIdeas]

Brainstorming a solution... here's how I would solve this by building a custom app:

- Set up an app server / database that keeps track of the inventory available for any products you want to put the hold on.

- When a user adds a product to the cart, ping that database to see if there are still products available. Also decrement the product count available for other users

- Any time a user adjusts their cart, hit the app server to adjust the available data

- Set a timer so that X minutes after adding a product to cart, the available product count in the database gets increased (not sure if you can update that user's cart remotely, but if they don't purchase in time, their held products become available to someone else and they'll get the out of stock message).

- Optionally, create an interface where you can log into the app via your Shopify admin and adjust the inventory you want to hold / products to hold... the app could also auto sync inventory as another option.

If you're losing a lot of customers over this, building a custom app is probably a positive ROI. If it's just a small amount of lost revenue, you could wait but I don't foresee this being added as a native feature because it's too niche.

If you need help with a custom app build, feel free to send the details to speedboostr.com/contact - that's my team. We build a lot of private Shopify apps, and have a few public apps as well.

[GabbyGrace]

Thank you for your input. 

The steps you are saying are a little foreign to me as I'm not a techie person, lol. But I think it should be a seamless process that I wouldn't have to be involved in. The customer experience should be easy. I see an item, I add it to cart. I go browse for other items without the fear that if someone beats me to checkout in the 2 or 3 minutes it takes me to add other things to my cart, I lose out on the original items. Again, when I post to social media that new items are on the site, it is like Black Friday at Walmart. People rush to the site! And it doesn't make sense that they don't have a guarantee of at least 5 minutes before things in their cart can be purchased by other people. 

[Jolienec]

Hey. This is exactly why I have not used shopify yet! Store is ready to go. Like you I have items sel out in minutes! I would likey customers to be able to add items to cart all week as I post new items nightly at a specific time. I want their items to stay in the cart untill they pay say a specific time. Why can't items be taken out of inventory and they can implement a cart hold feature where we get to pick when carts drop. I would love for my customers to be able to add all week and then the cart drops back Into inventory Friday at 12 am if the cart isn't paid. 

Let me know if you resolved this issue and how. Because  thinking of moving to a different website if I cannot get this feature for my customers.