Circuitcity.com's annoying timeout

Scott Manning
May 1, 2003 | Comments (3)

While browsing Circuit City's website, I was looking at various products that I may buy. I found a product I was interested in and left my browser open while I went to lunch.

I was gone for about an hour.

When I got back, I went back to the browser to check out the product I was viewing and continue my hunt for products. Upon my first click, I received a message telling me that my session had timed out.

I was a little baffled for a second by this since session timeouts are typically used for things that require a secure login like email. For security purposes, Internet email sites will automatically log out in the event that you are inactive on the site for more than an hour or so. This comes in handy when you're checking your email on a public computer.

But all I was doing was browsing their products.

The error message read accordingly:

Hello from the Circuit City Web Server!

Your session with the circuitcity.com website either timed out or couldn't be retrieved.

Our recommendation: try getting back to where you were by clicking on your browser's refresh button first. If this doesn't work, select the link below to access the Circuit City homepage.

What the heck? Hello from the Circuit City Web Server? And with an explanation point. The Circuit City Web Server must be excited to see me (and he should be).

I don't think I have to go through how annoying this is. But I'm more concerned as to why the site was set up this way. Is this how the designers of the site wanted it to be? Is it due to technical restrictions? Or is it simply just a screw-up?

Either way, the last thing you want to when customers are trying to view your products is work against them.

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Comments (3):

1) Posted by: Adam
May 5, 2003 10:31 AM

My guess is it's a security measure to stop people from adding things to your cart while you're out or something along those lines.

2) Posted by: Eric
May 5, 2003 9:27 PM

Well you don't have to be in a secure area of a site to be using Session Variables, and various otherways of tracking users and what they do. Remember the web is a stateless environment im sure their site has some pretty advanced ways of string info on your computer and tracking your user sessions. And it's also possible that you were gone longer than an hour. I try and set mine to 1 day. But different sites require different measures. I wouldn't find this annoying, but you have the right to speak your voice.

3) Posted by: Kelly
October 29, 2004 10:31 AM

We've updated the session handling on the site so that in 99% of the cases, a stale session that gets restarted will appear to be seemless (no error message) to the user.

The major reason that the timeout occurs is to free up resources behind the scenes.