How Do Websites Remember Your Cart?
Most retail websites offer shopping carts or some variation, such as a shopping bag, in which you can place a product by clicking a link button, such as "Buy" or "Add to Cart." If you leave the website, the website will still remember the products in a particular shopping cart by means of implanting what is called a "persistent cookie" -- a small text file -- on the shopper's computer.
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Persistent and Perpetual Shopping Carts
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Retail website keep track of how many items are in a user's shopping cart and displays the total number of items on each Web page visited in the website. This is called a "perpetual shopping cart." As the shopper navigates through the website, the cart total is updated and often a price subtotal is also displayed. A "persistent shopping cart" saves the cart's contents even after the shopper leaves the website. The cart information is saved by using a persistent cookie on the shopper's computer. Some websites use both perpetual and persistent shopping carts.
Persistent Cookies
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A Web or browser cookie is a tiny piece of data sent by a website to a user's computer to embed pertinent information. A persistent cookie, such as those used by persistent shopping cart websites, carries the information of the shopping cart product contents. Therefore, when the computer user revisits the website, the shopping cart contents are remembered. The cookie's data is also embedded with an expiration date, so that the user can return to the retail website within the date and the cart contents are still remembered.
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Removing Cookies
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Some computer users do not want persistent cookies on their computer and may choose to remove them. If cookies are removed on a user's computer, then when that user revisits the retail website, the shopping cart contents will have disappeared. Some retail websites, such as Amazon.com, use persistent cookies associated with the user's account data. So even if the cookies are deleted from the user's computer, the shopping cart contents will still be present when the user signs in to his Amazon account.
Using Cookies
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Both retail websites and computer users should practice responsible shopping cart habits. For example, a retail website determines how long the cookie is present on the user's computer and for how long their shopping cart remains active. When the user revisits the website and purchases a product, they may have forgotten another item was in the shopping cart. However, retail websites have discovered they save up to 24 percent of their sales by using persistent cookies and persistent shopping carts.
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References
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