Cookie Problem

[marknc]

Today two customers have experienced cookie problems at the shopping basket and checkout as below:
"Your site lets me add one or two items, and then the shopping cart empties itself and when I try to add another item it tells me Im blocking cookies, sometimes it wont even let me add one item"
This person has privacy control switched off allowing ALL COOKIES, running Windows XP with standard firewall.
The second person I do not have details of only that they persisted and after 5 attempts managed to make the purchase.

I have searched this community and read similar problems but haven't found any obvious causes or clear solutions. What worries me is that we may well be losing business over this without even knowing, as customers may just abandon the site after meeting this problem.

Can anyone suggest any course of action, checks I might make, corruptions that may occur. Might a site refresh solve the problem? Any help on this would be very gratefully received.
Worried
Mark

[Nadeem]

Hi Mark,

The cookie error may be a red herring, instead it possible you are running of of diskspace. The tell tale sign is:

"Your site lets me add one or two items, and then the shopping cart empties itself

The last part is what leds me to believe you are running out of diskspace. It cannot be a cookie issue, otherwise the first part would not work. Please could you check this out, if you have an ftp program like CuteFTP or SmartFTP, upload a 1 meg file to your /acatalog/ folder. If you can an error message that says cannot upload - exceed allocation, then it is diskspace.

Kind Regards

[marknc]

Cookie Problem

Hi Nadeem,
I uploaded the 1 meg file without a problem. We have a dedicated server with nothing else on it so I know it's not a disk space problem.
Anyway the customer did manage to order in the end, (five attempts I believe). I do suspect it was an isolated incident and down to the visitors computer rather than us, as for the rest of that day orders trickled in at a steady rate with no further inquiries.
I will keep my eye on it and thanks for your input.
Mark

[Nadeem]

Hi Mark

Hmmm a strange issue as the error messages suggests it being out of disk space. Anyway thanks for letting us know and hope this was an one off issue.

Kind Regards