Problem with Items added to cart dissapearing

[crossan]

i have a problem that some of my customers experience, they add an item to the cart, all goes as planned. but if they view the cart later it appears empty.
any ideas would be grateful. as i say some people have no problems at all

[Mike Hughes]

What does the customer see? do they get a message saying the cart is empty? do they get a cart page with nothing in it? or do they get a page saying the cart has expired?

Mike

[crossan]

they get a cart page with nothing in it
the site is www.thevisorshop.com

[Matthew Brown]

Cart Disappearing

Hi,
I had that with a site - when you upload does the merge at the end go ok?
If not, you need to check the server has all permissions set correctly.
If ok, then it could be your server supplier hasn't got the SSL set up correctly

Matthew
http://www.jamcomm.com

[Mike Hughes]

For some reason adding to the cart is on www.thevisorshop whereas the rest of the site and the checkout, viewcart etc isn't. the browser sees the www. and non-www url as being different and so won't give the cookie details to one when it comes from the other.

If I were you I'd fix it so that everything is on www. This is what most people expect and will avoid this of problems (also when getting external links etc as most will use www. for the link).

Mike

[crossan]

yes i think you may have a point Mike, thanks for that, i will see if i can get everything changed over to www. to see if that cures the problem. How or why would this have been changed in the first place away from a url of www. any idea?

[Mike Hughes]

I'm not sure why it's set up this way. Check that your network settings for website url, catalog url and cgi-bin location have www. specified.

Mike

[GrahamL]

This is all very interesting, as I'd had reports from customers of similar things happening occasionally (they'd add to cart and if they added a 2nd item it would clear the first or if they went to checkout the item would be gone).

We thought it might have had something to do with Zone Alarm as most customers that reported the problem had this installed. There was also odd instances of people arriving via Google having the same or similar problem - mainly from Adwords as our listings still suck!

So after Mikes advice - on http://www or just http:// - I did a search through our Site1 folder (using a great little batch find and replace utility from Abacre) and found virtually all our sites pages had mixed links and references.

I also checked our Google Adwords links, and again, found some incoming links missing the www. bit.

So I've swapped them all over and now we'll have to wait and see if that sorts it out and cures the problem!

If it does I owe you a big thanks Mike

Graham