Can someone explain this cart/availability behavior?

JayB-SoCal

I will be looking for certain bricks, I have a tendency to create a few carts and then hold them for some days as I build them up until I have the pieces needed and enough from a store to buy. Sometimes there will be pieces I have kept an eye on but not added to any carts. The pieces are available for weeks, no change in availability that I can detect. But within 1-2 days after adding them to my cart they are no longer available because someone else bought them all from that store. This isn't just an occasional anomaly, it's happened dozens of times.

From my perception, what seems like is happening is that store owners can see the carts of anyone for their store (pre-purchase) and be able to alert past loyal customers when someone else may buy up bricks that their loyal customer ones. That customer then scoops those parts up.

Am I off on this? I can't think of another explanation. And, again, this is not just coincidence happening over & over, I will keep an eye on some pieces and then finally and only after I add to a cart of mine those pieces are all gone within 1-2 days when they were otherwise not moving for weeks. If I am correct, can we please have stealth carts? I want to be able to take a few days to put carts together without now feeling like I need to keep offline notes for certain parts until the last second of needing to purchase...

Lawrence

I can confirm there is no way for stores, or other users, to see what items are in your cart. Stores can see a count of how many carts are open in their store, but no further information other than the count.

JayB-SoCal

OK, just my paranoia...

qwertyboy

We regularly see similar behavior, in that we have a fair amount of a certain part that doesn’t seem to sell a single item, and then within a few days there are several buyers who together manage to empty that particular lot (and not even orders on BO only). Could be some new MOC, or pure coincidence, dunno. But seeing as this happens cross-site, there is no funny business (as Lawrence already said).

JayB-SoCal

I think it's possible when maybe certain contests pop up that similar thinking arises which causes people to plan on grabbing same types of parts? Or some kind of event/inspiration that reaches a wide audience. It's just so hard when certain bricks in certain colors are not very common!

Graham

Over the years of selling. I have noticed patterns, some of which are kind of obvious :-

More black, orange and purple parts sell sept/oct
Red, green and white nov/dec
etc

However also orders from all over buying the same parts (that have been sitting for months) in a single week.

I can only guess that something triggers it, maybe a popular MOC... or a large event... who knows but it certainly happens quite frequently

Coldwater

Let's not forget that it IS possible to see the most recently viewed items in one's store. While this doesn't directly answer the OP's concerns, it does have a bearing.

JayB-SoCal

@ColdwaterCreekBricks I'll try to stay away from paranoia thinking but I do tend to "look a lot" as I'm double-checking items and if the site treats every click as unique instead of grouping by user then it may be possible I influence the most recently viewed heavily. I would hope not as I would like to think the stores I use have a lot more customers, but certainly an interesting thought. I'm learning to buy quick - but that leads to other issues like needing to combine orders last minute.

Anyway, currently it's not a big deal, I have so many bricks now of a large enough variety that it's usually only a few special type of bricks that I have to jump in to buy - and it's not so much not being able to find them as it is not over-paying. Also I've build up a habit now of replenishing certain bricks when I've used a fair amount on recent builds, which helps me to focus on buying bricks I tend to use and not ones that are just cool but never use. Most recently though I bought up probably way too many of the little clip arm type bricks yet I hardly use those. There is a vision in the back of my mind of an elaborate build which will use them... but it's not a clear idea yet.

BrickGenie

As a seller I can assure that's not what's happening. To start off it would be extremely impracticable to keep an eye on this and inform a select group of people. Second of all, why would someone buy something just because I emailed them someone else is interested? If they want it they would have bought it. Third of all and maybe the most important one, why would I as a seller care who I sell to? It really makes no difference if I ship the part to Customer A or Customer B.

It would all just take a tremendous amount of effort for very little to no extra profit.

BrickGenie

And just to be clear, the above would only be a consideration if we were able to see customer's cart data which we aren't. BrickOwl does not provide that data and as I said even if it would I highly doubt anyone would do anything with it.