WHC TBR ordering system (1 Viewing)

Is anyone else annoyed by WHC's tbr order system? Or is it just me?

Sometimes I'll place an early TBR order, simply because its a no-brainer decision for domains I want to be in the auction on. I also don't want to miss out in case I get busy/distracted on a Wednesday morning and don't have time to place orders. But most of the time I'll be placing some last minute orders as well.

So making that first order works as expected. I can bulk add the domains or individually add to the cart. Then I hit the "place bids" button, go to the check out page, and submit my payment details. That works fine.

If I come back later to add more TBR orders, the old ones are still listed in the shopping cart. Why the heck is that? I already ordered them, they should not be in my cart. It also makes me wonder, did my original order go through? It also means that as I add more domains to my next order, its confusing to know what had I previously ordered vs what I'm ordering now. Maybe for people that order one or two domains and that's it its not a big deal. But if you're ordering dozens of domains at a time, it is annoying. And then you start to question yourself, do i need to manually remove these old orders from my cart? If I don't, will I be bidding against myself and raising the price? Or do I just leave then in there??? Honestly, its just not intuitive or expected behaviour, IMHO.

So then when I go to submit that new order and make payment, it does warn me there is was a problem with some domains, and it then scrubs them from the order. So in the end it works. I can also understand that the way they programmed it, if they just removed the domains from my cart afterwards, then the main list of TBR domains won't know anymore that I've already ordered those domains, thus allowing me to accidentally place another order for the same domain, but now at a higher price.

It seems clear that the act of scrubbing domains with "problems" from the final order placement was a hack to fix the poor planning/programming. Of course it could be fixed properly, I just don't feel like WHC has had enough motivation to do so.

Does this bug other people too or just me? Just thinking if I'm not the only one bothered by it, maybe they'll fix it.

I agree, and I've found that since a lot of the problems occur from WHC storing all this data in local resident files, closing down my browser after performing any TBR orders or other transactions results in a much cleaner experience.

And true, this is yet another "hack" but I find it preferable to the alternative.

The cart should be cleared automatically when an order is completed. For some reason this just doesn't appear to always work. It does work for me when I test it locally, which means it's difficult to reproduce for me and thus difficult to track down. I will try to reserve some some time for testing this - originally I thought it was connected to clients switching devices, but that doesn't appear to be the case though.

Any additional details you can think of that you think might be helpful?

I understand that the fix to review the cart at payment time isn't ideal, but is the only fix that was available to us without restructuring large parts of the order process.

I get the same issue with previous backordered domains not clearing.
I am on Mac OS - M1 - Firefox browser

silentg said:

I get the same issue with previous backordered domains not clearing.
I am on Mac OS - M1 - Firefox browser

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I'm on Mac as well, M1 and M2, typically using firefox. But I'd be surprised if it was o/s or browser specific issue.

I did notice that the cart contents on one computer is not the same cart contents on another. So in this case, I started to add stuff to the cart on my desktop. Then later on the laptop, I had an empty cart, re-added the domains and some other, went through and paid. Then later I noticed back on the desktop that the domains I entered earlier from the desktop were still there, but not all of the ones I ordered from the laptop. So I went back to the laptop, and all the orders I made from there (and successfully completed the payment step for) were still in my cart there too. So it seemed clear to me that each computer/browser/login was using a different session, which is what is typically expected. If you use syncing services for your specific browser, I think you can get it to sync sessions, if that's something you want to do. I might have to look into that. But the issue of the carts not clearing is not expected, and that's where the problem lies.

I tested it, and if I manually removed a previously ordered domain from my cart, then the master list no longer knows I already ordered that domain (it shows the add to cart button again). I figured WHC purposely didn't clear the cart so that it would avoid that problem. However, that problem can also be solved by just querying the database on the initial page load, and putting the previously ordered domains into a hash stored in the session. That's why I thought it more of a lazy hack fix than anything. But if the cart is actually clearing for some people, that's weird... When I get around to ordering more domains, I'll test it out again and see if the cart gets cleared or not.