Expensive To Serve

Roaming users/Buying users

Some users are way more demanding than others. Ironically, these are usually the ones we want more of. For example, in a retail system, users who browse a couple of pages, maybe do a search, and then go away are both the bulk of users and the easiest to serve. Their content can usually be cached (however, see Use Caching carefully, for important cautions about caching). Serving their pages usually does not involve external integration points. We will likely do some personalization, maybe some clickstream tracking, and that’s about it.

But then there’s that user who actually wants to buy something. Unless we’ve licensed the one-click checkout patent, checkout probably takes four or five pages. That’s already as many pages as a typical user’s entire session.

On top of that, checking out can involve several of those troublesome integration points:

• Credit card authorization
• Sales tax calculation
• Address standardization
• Inventory lookups
• Shipping