Amazon Shopping Cart

Ninety First Post: Amazon Shopping Cart

I was shopping online at Amazon today and made a great discovery. (Actually the discovery was posted on every page I surfed.) Amazon sells food. They have sold food before, but this was all types of food.

Well finding food was a good find, but as I began to fill my shopping cart I noticed something. You can only add items to your cart one at a time and only by pressing the cart button. This may not seem unusual, I just wish you could add more items to the cart faster. But here is a weakness of Amazon if you could send a request for more items to be added to the cart, the computer would go haywire. It would be similar to a DOS attack. Of coarse, you would have to have some know how. But if it were known what instruction the “add to cart button” used, you could use it to send a few million things to the cart at once.

I’m not a hacker and don’t recommend trying to crash Amazon. I shop there all the time, but I bet this is the reason when shopping online that you have to manually add items. They have probably predicted this kind of attack and have some sort of server side code to prevent this. Sometimes it is just interesting to think about how these websites we visit work.