Hold cart for a short period of time

[Momsstitchetti]

I have been searching and there doesn’t seem to be a solution, but I thought I would ask in case things have changed. 

I do restocks in my shop on Saturdays. Items sell out within minutes, often having customers compete to the second to click the button to finish checkout. This results in angry customers as well as some customers placing multiple orders to ensure they get what they want. When customers place multiple orders, I then have to go in and refund extra shipping, manually fulfill orders, etc. (it would be so nice if there was an option to combine customer orders….)

is there any way to have a customers cart held for a small amount of time so that the inventory isn’t sold out from under them? It would take a burden off my shoulders and make my customers much happier. 

[Anonymous]

Hi @Momsstitchetti,

One approach if you're on Shopify Basic or Advanced is to write a script that runs on the cart page. You can remove cart items with Shopify AJAX API. You can insert a cookie to keep track of how long items have been in the cart and simple empty the cart after the time runs out. 

Regards,

Sam - Owner / Lead Developer 

Achieve Applabs

[WoodlandHC]

I'm confused how this would solve the issue when customers are checking out within seconds of each other.  Wouldn't you have to set the cart expiry to something like 1 second?  And if you did that wouldn't no one be able to check out?

[SproutKey]

I’m finishing my 3rd iteration of this feature.  I’ve put years into it and finally have a solution that will work with very high traffic sales, where people are competing to get it in their cart, to find out they actually missed out.  This isn’t the way the real world works and it shouldn’t be this way when virtually shopping either.

Please let me know and I’ll be happy to let you know when I have it ready.  It will be within the next 2 months.

Thank you!

[WoodlandHC]

I would be interested depending on the cost if it actually works.  I know at least a dozen other online sellers who would be interested as well.