HACKER Q&A
📣 imheretolearn

Consequences of adding all items on Amazon in the cart?


I was talking to a family member where they wanted to order a lot of goods from a website. I jokingly said I'll write a script to add all the items on the website to the cart. What would be the consequences if one were to write such a script? I know of one off cases were one item was priced in millions. My understanding is that even if one were to order such a highly priced item, the payment processor wouldn't let it through.

Edit: I do NOT intend to do so.


  👤 petercooper Accepted Answer ✓
For Amazon specifically, you can have up to 50 unique items or 1000 total items in a cart: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200497950

I would hope all shopping cart providers and e-commerce sites would have some similar sort of hard limit.


👤 ykat7
I imagine Amazon's bot detection would flag the high volume of requests made with this pattern:

a) fetch products from a particular category

b) add products to cart

c) proceed to checkout

Amazon doesn't mention how they'd enforce against scraping but my guess is IP- and account-level restrictions.