1. Cart on this site can hold an item for 15 minutes. So if you managed to add a skein of yarn to cart it is temporarily removed from shop stock and no one else can purchase it for those 15 minutes. If you don’t purchase it after 15 minutes it is removed from your cart and again available for everyone. This is done to prevent cartjacking during updates but it also means that you can’t use cart as a way to just favourite things like you can do on Etsy, for example.
2. The countdown runs for each added to cart item individually, so first item added will be the first to drop out of the cart. The countdown is shown to you on all pages and shows the remaining time for the item that will expire first.
3. When item is available for purchase and you add it to your cart if the action was successful (i.e. no one beat you to it) you’ll see violet message on top that says ”item xxx has been added to your cart. Please checkout in xx minutes”. On the product page the option to add to cart will disappear. For anyone else who was looking at that product if all stock is gone when they try to add it to cart page will reload, option to add to cart will disappear and violet message on top will say “item no longer available”. If some variations are still in stock the message will say the same but option to add to cart will remain so you can add other variations.
4. If a listing has variations and all available skeins were added to carts but haven’t been purchased yet the listing will still show up in the shop but there will be no options to add it to cart (and no system messages will be shown explaining why it is so). In case someone will remove it out of cart options to add to cart will reappear after you reload the page. If all skeins are actually purchased listing will be no longer displayed in the shop.
5. If a listing don’t have variations (like most of handspun yarns at the moment) when somebody adds it to cart it disappears from shop page even though it was not purchased yet. But if it is dropped out of cart later it reappears (after you reload the page). In the future I will be making all listings as variable products even if I have only one skein of the yarn so the site will be uniform in that regard and so you would know which yarns are already in someone’s carts but not purchased yet.