Quote Originally Posted by Orophin View Post
I'm not sure the shopping cart is such a great idea. If there's only one of an item available it won't be able to handle three people trying to get that item at the same time. Can't say this would happen all the time, but if an item is popular enough and the supply is very low, it's not fair that the first person that sees it can tie it up in a shopping cart, but then changes their mind on it and it goes back to the available sale inventory. I think the first come, first serve environment works better and that this idea would be hard to implement.
That's assuming that just the act of placing an item in your shopping cart would lock it out.

If I were designing the system, I wouldn't have the item tied up just because it is sitting in a shopping cart. Only when I click on the purchase button would the system verify that everything was available and nothing had changed.

If something had changed, e.g. an item was no longer available or a price had changed, it would return the player to the shopping cart and highlight the changes, asking the player if they still want to proceed with the transaction.