We had a sale where we had 2 limited edition items go up for sale. We had a large volume of clients quickly trying to purchase through checkout, they were adding items into their cart, however when they completed checkout the item in the cart had switched to another product, resulting in the company issuing a large number of refunds to the customers and the item selling out before these first customers could obtain them. Any ideas on how/why that occurred?
We have sales like this often and while they sell out quickly, and the lack of a cart timer/placeholder has been an issue, we have not encountered this before. Our usual complaints of items being “swiped” from their cart have now become more complicated with this issue, of them ending up with items they did not select.
Hi @LH805E ,
This is Theodore from PageFly - Shopify Page Builder App.
The issue where customers ended up with different items in their cart during a high-demand sale on Shopify could be due to several reasons: glitches in the inventory management system struggling to update in real-time, issues with website caching or customer browser cookies, conflicts caused by third-party apps or custom scripts, user interface confusion, or overlapping session data in high traffic situations. To resolve this, you should upgrade your inventory management to handle high traffic, optimize website performance for accurate cart data, review and possibly adjust third-party apps and scripts, improve the user interface design to minimize customer errors, and consider implementing a cart reservation system to secure items during checkout. These steps can enhance the customer experience and reduce similar issues in future sales.
I’ll be so happy if my suggestion can help to solve your problem. If you have any further questions, please feel free to tell me.
Best regards,
Theodore | PageFly
The issue is level-of-detail and reproduction, without investing time in implementation details or clear reproduction steps, every answer is swinging at windmills with no real indication of a technical issue.
If you cannot reproduce the issue yourself the simplest answer is user error:
users are lying about what they are adding to the cart in an attempt to get the desired item through a replacement process.
Next simplest is they do not know they are lying because in their haste they are just adding things to the cart and not verifying either in the cart step itself, or during the checkout process where the line-items being ordered are shown for more verification.
User errors like that can be fixed with sales final policies.
To rule out user error you would need literal video of a customer going from product page to checkout with the desired item, then them getting the wrong item in order status/email AFTER checkout.
If you can reproduce the error BEFORE checkout, for sales using apps sometimes apps are slow and do not finish properly loading before a user starts clicking on the page.
In which case users may think they are clicking one thing, when they should be clicking something else that an app injects.
Similar for theme-customizations which is often a cache issue where the customization is changing which product is being shown but the users browser still has the old content.