Generally, it matches my expectations. Shopping carts, sessions, and even most user preferences are fine and don’t need a banner. Worst case a small “uses cookies” text next to a language change button is enough.
"A cookie that is exempted from consent should have a lifespan that is in direct relation to the purpose it is used for, and must be set to expire once it is not needed, taking into account the reasonable expectations of the average user or subscriber. This suggests that cookies that match CRITERION A and B will likely be cookies that are set to expire when the browser session ends or even earlier. However, this is not always the case. For example, in the shopping basket scenario presented in the following section, a merchant could set the cookie either to persist past the end of the browser session or for a couple of hours in the future to take into account the fact that the user may accidentally close his browser and could have a reasonable expectation to recover the contents of his shopping basket when he returns to the merchant’s website in the following minutes."
I was using the website for a Dutch big box hardware store (Gamma) today, and it had a door stopper I was looking to purchase half a year ago in my shopping cart. I never finished that transaction. That kind of retention is just pointless.
A session based cookie can then be used to store your identity in a short term session, and the server can easily gather long-term storage on its own.
I think it’s a fair compromise to say “if you want to save this cart, please log in”, which satisfies opt-in data tracking in a user friendly way. You aren’t mandating a user account, but if you opt in you get something potentially useful.
My principle complaint about most of the discourse on this topic is that it is superficial. There are reasonable workarounds for most user-friendly tracking that allow for tacit opt-in via responsible and clear UX. The “hard parts” seem to generally concern the type of tracking that isn’t so clearly user-friendly, such as behavior tracking and PII collection, which is a conversation we should be having anyways without obfuscating the issue by pretending it’s about the easy stuff.
For example, remembering things like Dark Mode, pop-up re-sizing, slider locations (volume for example) are all legitimate use cases that I would prefer as a user to be isolated per client.
Since the site does not know you are leaving, it doesn't have any opportunity to prompt you and ask whether you would like to save your cart (and if it did I would find it pretty annoying)
I do. I use the shopping cart as a staging area sometimes when deciding what to buy. In fact, I don't really see a good reason for a shopping cart ever lose items I put in it until I explicitly remove them or they stop being available, since the whole point of a cart is to express intent to buy.
At the very least if a site doesn’t offer Wishlist, shipping list or other bookmarking facilities I would expect the shipping cart to give me a cookie that lasts at least three days to cover the weekend or the option to create an account to save that shopping list/cart to come back to later.