What carries when you switch mid visit

The short list

• Your account, because it belongs to the market rather than to a route. See one account.
• Every order that has been placed, in whatever state it is in.
• Every message that has been sent or received.
• Your balance, which is one figure and not a per route figure.
• Anything else the market has recorded about your activity, whatever that is.

Why it carries

Because none of it was ever attached to the address. The route carried a request in and an answer out. Once the request had arrived, the route had no further part in what happened.

This is the same reasoning as the whole equivalence section, applied at the moment it matters most, which is when a reader is mid task and worried about losing something.

What it feels like in practice

You paste a different string, you are treated as a new arrival, you go through whatever stands at the entrance, you sign in, and everything is where you left it.

The sequence contains two moments that feel like loss and are not: the unfamiliar entrance and the sign in screen. Both are described in the session not being shared, and expecting them removes most of the discomfort.

Why this half has to be said first

A reader who is not sure whether switching costs them something will not switch. They will sit on a route that is not working, or wait, or start looking for explanations, because moving feels risky.

That is the real cost of not knowing this. It converts a set of three into a set of one exactly when the other two are most useful, which is the failure the whole site keeps returning to.

The boundary, in one line

Submitted is safe, typed is not. Everything in what is dropped is a consequence of that line, and the line falls at the moment something leaves your screen rather than at any moment you can see.

A common over reading

Some readers conclude from all this that switching is completely free and start doing it casually, mid task, several times a visit. It is nearly free, and the nearly is doing some work: each move costs an entrance, a sign in, and anything sitting in a form.

The proportionate view is that switching is cheap enough to do whenever there is a reason and expensive enough not to do for no reason. The cost of switching puts a size on it.

What this study cannot promise

It assumes the address you are moving to is one of the ones you hold. Nothing in this reasoning applies to a string from elsewhere, because the argument depends on both addresses being routes to the same market.

That is not a small caveat. It is the reason the strings should come from your own store rather than from whatever page you are on when you decide to move.

The summary worth carrying

Nothing you have actually done is at risk when you change route. The market remembers you, not the corridor you walked down. Everything that can go wrong in a switch happens on your screen, in the seconds before you leave the page.

Why the reassurance is the operative half

A reader who is confident that nothing saved is at risk will use all three routes. A reader who is unsure will use one and treat the rest as a last resort, and a last resort that has never been tried is not a resort at all.

So this study is not really about comfort. It is the precondition for the set functioning, and a market could publish a hundred addresses without helping anybody who believes that moving between them costs something.

What this study is not. It is not a claim that a switch is invisible to anyone, and this site makes no claims about what any party can observe.