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*** Screen-scrapers beware! ***

edited Sep 14, 2007 3:24PM in Web Site / E-Commerce 1 comment

Let me explain a problem I have seen several sites get themselves into by "screen-scraping" without fully understanding URL parameters.

"Screen scraping" is grabbing some HTML from NetSuite by viewing source, finding a snippet of HTML that appears to do something useful, then pasting that HTML back into a template or a hosted page.

The site I was investigating had a problem that every user who shopped at their site ended up sharing the same shopping cart. Eventually the cart had an astonishing 90 million items in it, valued at $10B! How could this happen?

It turns out that user had screen-scraped a personalized login URL from the source of their store, then pasted that into hosted HTML that everyone would see, and would forevermore use when logging in. Reusing an URL would generally be ok, except that this particular URL that they scraped happened to contain a personalized parameter that sets the shopping cart id to a specific cart, that user's cart. Thus every user who clicked login in their site assumed (and shared) that one cart! You can imagine how things went after that.

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