Shopping cart expiry time

[greyhound]

Is it possible to expire the shopping cart when the user closes the browser.

The minimum time frame from within the web / expiry settings seems to be 1hr.

Thanks.

[TraceyG]

Hi,

I'm afraid not, but I'll add it to the wish list for you.

[Mike Hughes]

Is it possible to expire the shopping cart when the user closes the browser.

No. This isn't possible. All you know is when a customer last accessed a page on the website. Once he's done that you have no idea whether he's reading the page, closed the browser or gone off to another site.

Adding this to the wish list just;

a) makes the wishlist full of things that can't and won't be done.

b) gives the requester the mistaken idea that this might appear in the next release.

Surely there should be some kind of 'does this make sense' approach to adding things to the wishlist. Maybe even finding out why they want it so that at least the request is properly understood and alternative approaches considered.

Mike

[RuralWeb]

as mike says this is a waste of time adding to the wish list. There are far better things actinic need to be working on.

[RuralWeb]

Actinic should not add this to the wish lost based on one users request. There is a wish list thread where things like this can be posted and then voted on by the community which gives actinic an idea of how important they would be as an addition to the software. As mike states just adding stuff to the wish list gives false hope and sends developers off on a wild goose chase where they will end up breaking another linked part of the software.

IMO before an item is added to the wish lost it should get at least 10 votes from members of the forum.

[zmagyar]

It may be possible to change the cart cookie to session cookie. Some perl hacking would be needed for that. Just open ACTINIC.pm and find the lines

		print "Set-Cookie: ACTINIC_CART=" .			# set the cookie
		   $sCookie . "; EXPIRES=" .
			$sSessionIdExpiry . "; PATH=/;\r\n";
		$bCookieIsSent = $::TRUE;						# a cookie is appended to the response

then change it to have

		print "Set-Cookie: ACTINIC_CART=" .			# set the cookie
		   $sCookie . "; PATH=/;\r\n";
		$bCookieIsSent = $::TRUE;						# a cookie is appended to the response

Please note it's just an idea and I have typed it directly to the forum without any testing. Therefore there is no guarantee there are no side effects or even it works at all. Take it on your own risk. :-)

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Zoltan,

I did wonder about session cookies but have to admit I hadn't realised that they didn't need a session ID appened to the filenames.

If they're as simple to use as they seem to be, why are there so many ecommerce sites using session IDs and files rather than cookies? Is it just because cookies were seen as being bad?

Mike

[zmagyar]

Hi,

There is some confusion in the terms here. By session cookie I meant a cookie which expires immediately after the browser session is closed. I.e. I was referring to the lifespan.

I believe you are referring to session cookie as something unique identifying a particular shopper. This session ID may be stored on different ways. Most common solution is storing the ID in a cookie (whose lifespan may be session only or longer).
As the world went paranoid in the last few years and cookies are more often disabled new solution appeared. This solution attaches the session ID to the end of all URLs. Unfortunately this latter solution can not easily be implemented in Actinic because it's a bit difficult due to the static pages. But php, asp, jsp, etc powered sites can use this solution. E.g. our PHP based Actinic Express uses both (if cookies are disabled it falls back to session IDs in the URLs).

[Stereo Steve]

I dunno, I recently had a customer buy something that had been taken off the site about 3 months before. He still had it in his cart and bought 8 or so mini hard drives for £80 each. In a panic, I phoned the supplier to see if I could fulfill and was amazed to find they were clearing this line and the price was now £9 each. They even dropshipped them for me! I think we cleared about £500 for a single call. The customer was delighted as well. Keep it in!