More proof CafePress is pulling a fast one on its shopkeepers

As noted in this recent post, Is CafePress pulling a fast one?, a new phenomenon has been noted by many CafePress shopkeepers. It's called the "mysterious abandoned shopping cart syndrome." It goes like this (and we're getting this information from various stat/log counters):

- someone arrives at our shop via a search, for example they search Google for pro-choice merchandise

- they click on our link, Pro-choice Main Page

- they pop in and out of various designs' pages, looking at a t-shirt here, a magnet there, and end up adding a few items to their shopping cart; those entries look like this in our logs:

(3) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.420450753
(4) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117
(5) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts/802117
(6) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651
(7) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117
(8) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651
(9) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117

In the above example, line #3 shows a bumper sticker -- http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.420450753 -- that the customer added to their shopping cart, as shown in line #4. The customer chose to 'keep shopping' after they added the bumper sticker to their cart; when they did that, CafePress returned them to the parent page the bumper sticker was on, http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts/802117

Lines #6 & #7 and #8 & #9 show the customer adding a button -- http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651 -- twice, to their cart, then returning to the design's parent page. This customer spent almost 9 minutes in my shop--not an insignificant amount of time--before losing track of them. (Once a customer enters the netherworld of the CafePress fulfillment process, we lose access to their movement.) From YEARS of experience I can pretty safely say that people who spend that much time perusing the shop, carefully selecting items and adding them to their shopping cart are not going to--100% of the time--change their minds and abandon their cart. Yet that's what I'm seeing. Over and over again.

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