"Your shopping cart has expired" error - did anyone ever find a fix?

[tintin99]

Every so often our customers report getting an error page on checking out which tells them "Your shopping cart has expired". This is very worrying because for the 2 or 3 people who tell us about it there may be many more who just go elsewhere.

From searching the forums this seems to be a very common problem but almost impossible to fix due to the fact that it only happens intermittently. We've tried all the simple fixes that have been suggested such as extending the time before carts are deleted.

Can anyone tell me if there was ever a solution found, or if there is a single definitive list of things to try anywhere? There are so many threads discussing this problem but no-one seems to have come up with the answer.

Perhaps someone from Actinic could comment?

Thanks in anticipation.

[parklifeclothes]

Have a look in Web, Configure Expiry Periods and maybe look at extending the time allowed before the cart expires

[tintin99]

Hi - thanks, but we tried that - it didn't work.

I forgot to mention in my original post that we are using 1and1 with shared SSL and Protx.

[Darren B]

and have you increased the time in actinic and checked the server time

[tintin99]

Yes, we increased the Cart Expiry Period to 12 hours.

But people were getting the error even when checking out immediately after placing the order, so there was no way their carts could really have expired.

Please could you explain the bit about checking server time in case I've missed something there...thanks!

[parklifeclothes]

and have you increased the time in actinic and checked the server time

Have a look on your stats and make a note of visitors time and compare to real time, we have had times years ago when we were 6 hours behind so our expiry time was already out when cutomers entered our site, might be worth extending the expiry to something silly to see if it is that

[Darren B]

Yes, we increased the Cart Expiry Period to 12 hours.

But people were getting the error even when checking out immediately after placing the order, so there was no way their carts could really have expired.

Please could you explain the bit about checking server time in case I've missed something there...thanks!

sometimes people dont notice that the year is wrong, not the hours and mins.

the best way to check server time is to check the file time and dates of the files on your server. the actinic sessions ones would be good

[pinbrook]

theres a simple pl script you can get from www called something like getservertime.pl

upload this, and run it whenever you want to know the time

[tintin99]

Thanks for the replies. I've checked the server time and it's an hour ahead of UK time. The cart expiry time was 12 hours and we're upping it to 36 hours. Also we're just setting up dedicated SSL - we've been using shared up to now. Will let you know what happens!

[tintin99]

Well, we increased the expiry time to 36 hours and installed dedicated SSL and according to the error log we have just had another Cart Expiry Error!

Does anyone have any suggestions for what we should try next?

[leehack]

Does anyone have any suggestions for what we should try next?

Gotta be the pub, sounds a nightmare.

[tintin99]

Not a bad idea! Seriously thinking about moving to a different cart though...

[leehack]

Understand your frustration Bob, but there is 10k+ sites out there using this cart without this problem. It's either your site or your hosting, it is not software specific IMO. Did you find out the server time?

[tintin99]

Yes I ran a script on the server and the actual server time is an hour ahead of UK time but the time as recorded in the error logs is UK time.

Our website is heavily customised in terms of its appearance but when I set it up I was very careful not to disturb any Actinic code that handled the functionality - but...is it possible I might have done something that could cause this problem? If so is there anything obvious I should check?

[Rich Brady]

If it's not happening on every order, it's unlike to be anything you've done to the code.

Are you able to test the site on another server?