I worked in ecommerce for a while and got a peek at how people behave on websites. It turned out the cart abandonment is always the number one issue for businesses (I worked with several). It's very common for people to add things to cart as a means of bookmarking and then never returning. Naturally, this is an area businesses spend some money on to try and lower the cart abandonment rate. They'll send out emails to try to lure you back. Often, after a few emails they'll send a discount code, sometimes up to 30%, and in some cases I have seen 50%. In some cases they do this at a loss because the customer lifetime value is greater over the long haul.

A bit unrelated but I heard a funny story from a company I joined as an ecom manager for one year. They had a sale on some expensive recreational gear (I won't say which as it may dox me), but apparently someone fatfingered the keyboard and instead of offering a small discount set one for 90% off. Needless to say customers flocked on the deal and instantly bought out all of the inventory for that item. It was such a great loss for the company, but the entire event went sort of viral on socials and people kept coming back to the website for a long time to see if they would find a similar deal. I don't know what happened to the pour soul who fatfingered that number but I imagine it wasn't anything good.

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I am familiar with such, not your specific case but I have witnessed such situations in the e-commerce arena in previous engagements - "back in the day" - lol.

Often the annoying thing is that the shipping costs etc are at the end of the process so you need to go thru the whole thing to figure out whether it’s worth at all.

I agree I have the same issue as plebs above me. Sometimes the offer is great but shipping costs are high or impossible at all.

And yes, sometimes your excitement drops, ratio kicks in and you simply understand that you don’t need the stuff.