Why do items vanish from my cart?

[The Juggling Hamster]

One way I like to shop is place items into my cart and then think about it until later...why do they vanish from my cart occasionally?

[Hannibal]

Happens to me all the time and for quite some time. Also happens when you load your cart up with a lot of purchases. Huge time waster for me. I just buy keys on alternate sites rather than have to endure the steam store.

[RGX12]

That's something that's determined on the web development end. Most shopping cart systems found around the web track items you place in your cart via cookies set in your web browser. Note that these cookies are typically separate from the various other cookies a particular site might be setting (like the one that tracks the last time you've entered your Steam credentials, and when that one expires--usually at inopportune times--you're forced to log back in).

In any case, the expiration of those shopping-cart cookies can be configured by the vendor, and unfortunately (and surprisingly) many vendors give little thought to how a too-short expiration period annoys customers--and can negatively affect sales. IMO, Steam is definitely guilty of this, although they are not the worst offender out there.

I used to frequently shop at an online vitamin store. Imagine loading up your shopping cart with products you've spent an hour and a half researching, and deciding to come back later to finish up. When I went back the next day the shopping cart was empty. The first time this happened I thought it was a fluke; when it happened a second time I contacted the store about it and they said, "Oh yeah, your cart gets reset after 24 hours." What?! I asked them why should it bother them that I leave $80 worth of stuff in my cart for later, whether it's a day or a week or a month? Of course they didn't have a rational answer, except to say, "Well, the system sends you a reminder email that you've left something in your cart without checking out." Which was true, but moronic and about as useless as t*ts on a bull. Anyway, I was NOT going to pick everything out a third time, especially since I couldn't remember half the stuff I put in there the first time. Clearly these people had some brilliant business strategy I evidently couldn't comprehend. Except I never did business with them again. At the opposite extreme you have a store like Amazon; it doesn't matter how long you leave items in your cart--they never touch it. (Although Amazon works a bit differently: your cart contents are saved on the server, so it's the same no matter what web browser or computer you log in from).

Anyway, I can offer a quick suggestion. If you've gone particularly hog-wild picking out titles on Steam (or on any site whose "cart expiration policy" you're not familiar with)--and don't want to risk having them suddenly disappear on you--you can do what i often do: when you're done just dump the page to a file on disk for later reference ("Save page as html" from the browser's "File" menu). That way if for whatever reason you didn't check out, and later the browser cookie expires and your cart gets jettisoned, you can at least load that page back up in your browser and you have a list of the games you were thinking of plunking down cash for, complete with working links to their store pages (and all the original price calculations).

[Nilabraz]

Amazon leads by example here