Would it be too much for Google to program the bot to get the final price, and then delete all the items from the cart? Seems rather rude, even for Google.
Is this rude? I really don't care.
Putting something in a cart and leaving it there should be inconsequential to the seller. The only thing it might affect is their analytics. By the way, I consider analyzing my site visits and other data about me to be much more rude than abandoning a cart, especially when most sites don't even tell me they're doing it.
If it was consumer journalist doing it to get the price for a news article (in a for-profit publication) about the product, would it be “rude”? If not, how is it for Google bot?
I didn't read the article due to the paywall, but I assume that the problem is that the problem is that these goods are reserved for that (non)-customer until the shopping cart times out? That is directly costing the merchant money, either in lost sales or having to maintain extra inventory.
So yeah, that bot really should have been programmed to end the session with an empty basket one way or another.
If a customer really wants or needs something they’ll go back and buy it. The world doesn’t need the excess consumption of people psychologically manipulated into buying stuff they weren’t going to.