I read everything I could find on deleting abandoned carts. I'd rather not delete them all but there's one I MUST GET RID OF - if the others must go to do it, so be it. This person put $8,000 worth of supplies in their cart and some of these items are now unavailable for purchase by real customers until the cart releases them back to inventory. (We don't sell items out of stock because sometimes we can't get that exact item again for months, if at all.) I checked their IP address and they are in a country I don't sell or ship to anyway, so why can't I delete this cart?

In my Admin panel under SiteWide Settings > System Options > Number of Days to Save Customer Shopping Cart Contents I have 0. I set it this way a long time ago to help prevent this problem (our inventory moves fast and I like to keep it as current and accurate as possible). It seems like it has been deleting abandoned carts after 24 hours with this setting. I changed to 1, logged out, logged back in, changed to 0, logged out, logged back in. No change.

There must be a way to deal with this - what if some joker, or bad spider, went through my store and put ALL of my inventory in a cart then abandoned it? My store would not be able to sell anything until the cart expires or is deleted. Please tell me there is some way to delete this one cart (or all, I don't care). Thanks.

PS - Is this managed better in V7? I certainly hope so.

Saved carts do not lock up inventory. It's only on the completion of the sale. As far as I know this has been the case in v4 for most of the time. And v7 is no different. Have you checked the quantity in stock related to these products? Are they currently unavailable? Perhaps they were purchased in a different order?

If you only have QTYx1 in stock and you keep your customers from purchasing at 0, then two separate customers can put the same product in their cart at the same time. Whichever one finishes checkout first will complete the order. The other will get a warning message stating that the product had been removed from their cart and if they have other products in their cart they can continue. Is this not working this way on your site? Please check and let us know.

I wasn't aware that it worked that way - I'll do some testing. If it truly doesn't pull anything from inventory, then deleting the carts becomes a non-issue. Thanks for your quick response. I'll post back if I find mine isn't working that way.