Secure products availability during checkout process

[jaycmb]

What is the need / problem?

I’ve received a lot of complains that it is annoying to get stock availability issues when trying to checkout.

These complains are mainly coming from people trying to checkout as guest.

Indeed, while you are typing your credentials (address etc) the last stock item of a product you had in cart can be checkout by someone else. What happens:

• You hit checkout and an error then appears to explain you cannot buy this product anymore. Yet you maybe spent 6 minutes to fill everything… you were pretty sure the item was already yours. Grumpy mode level 1
• So you go back to your cart, make changes, then come back to checkout and 💥 you discover you have to fill everything in again. Grumpy mode level 2 engaged…
• And of course you can again have the problem while filling the page a second time… 🙈

This is annoying when you are used in other e-commerce website to have a secure cart while typing your credentials.

To avoid locking carts for people that might never return to the website, this is often done with a timer: you get something like 20 min to finish filling in your credentials. After these 20 minutes, the stock of your items will again be available to anyone else.

Some screenshot found on the web to illustrate what I’m taking about

What I like about this idea is that it could also help people who are not used to ecommerce website to understand that landing on /checkout does not mean your order is complete (my hubs are currently calling all their users with uncompleted orders, I don’t have specific numbers, but all the hubs I’m following have the problem: people don’t get they need to scroll down and hit checkout).

Having a clear banner saying the order will be completed only when all the steps below are done would be awesome.

Maybe we can split the two as the timer might be something complicated, but most people who don’t understand how to complete an order are also people who will be very slow to fill this page. So they are a bit the same target as guest checkout.
It could be nice to secure their cart while they do that and explain to them that we cannot hold on forever.

Which type of users does this problem affect (and how many, if known)?

e.g.
- Shoppers
- Hub Managers (MCFEs)

Potential solutions that will solve the problem?

From @luisramos

I think we should improve this but it doesn’t need a timer. The timer is not easy (stock management). I think this is too much for OFN right now.

There are two things that are easy here:

• very easy - banner on checkout page with something that informs the user “Checkout is not complete!”
• easy - in this banner we can include something about how much stock is available if stock is low like “only 2 more available”

Connected wishlist and discovery discussions*

Migrated from Discourse: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/secure-products-availability-during-checkout-process/1933/14

Originally opened
When: May '20
By: Rachel

Additional context

Re Analytics:

Maybe the first bit is to get data here. I’m curious how many people drop out at /checkout page.

Exemplary Matomo data for AUS for month of August shows, actually the majority of users places their order successfully (71%) once they reached /checkout.
When checking for 2021 YTD, the picture is pretty similar: 73% of users make it from /checkout -> to Order Sucess

Is Papercut or feature candidate?

Feature request

"Estimate" from @luisramos

Making the cart reserve stock for a period of time is an L at least. Some inception is needed (maybe we want to start this inception right now anyway? a new specific wishlist item?). We can make carts reserve stock but what happens after 10 minutes? Do the items get removed from the cart? Does the reserve expires but stock remains in cart? Is user warned about the timeout with a message somewhere?

[karlafalk]

This feature would help hubs in CA that experience rapid demand when their store opens (i.e. 12 orders being placed in the first 7 mins of the store opening), such that items in a customer's cart become out of stock by the time they checkout. This is frustrating for customers of the hubs, and has caused some hubs to lose clients. The suggestion was made/requested to have a 5-min 'cart hold' on items in the cart to alleviate this problem. Items placed in a shopper’s cart would be temporarily removed from the stock ‘on hand’ in OFN so other shoppers cannot put the same stock in their cart. If the shopper does not checkout within 5 min (or whatever time is deemed appropriate) then items in the cart would be returned to stock ‘on hand’ amounts in OFN.

[https://openfoodnetwork.slack.com/archives/CG7NJ966B/p1655997069304089]