Shopping cart problem

[lesliedocherty]

What do you do when you get a few customers trying to place orders and cannot complete transaction.

ie, woman today emails, puts item in basket, presses proceed, enters addy, then shopping cart tells her its empty.

i put it through at this end it works ok, tried it in Firefox IE, Safari all work ok.

i have had a few people say they had problems, which is worrying as a few saying means ten times as many not saying.

how do you test a system apart from putting through test transactions, ideas ?

[wood1e2]

Have you tested as a customer or through your admin?

Get your wife/partner/children to try using different computers/browser and buy different products.

Then see what happens.

[JamieM]

Hi Leslie,

I'm no expert but it sounds like it could be a cookies issue. Maybe try disabling cookies on a browser and see if you can replicate the problem.

Edit: I just tested it with cookies disabled in Firefox and that is what happens. Tell the customer she needs to set her browser to accept cookies if she wants to complete the order online.

[davidshaw89]

Have you tested as a customer or through your admin?

Get your wife/partner/children to try using different computers/browser and buy different products.

Then see what happens.

I have to agree with this.

Your computer might have a cookie already stored which stores the transaction data, and it is the creating of this cookie that is the problem on other computers.

Find a computer that you have never used to access your web site from before and use this to test.

[Astaroth]

Depending on how the site works then try to think of why they may be suffering the problem.... does the site use a sessionID that isnt part of the URL and therefore the session may be expiring? Are cookies required and therefore they may have cookies turned off? etc

Once you have identified suspected issues then draw up questions to ask the customer to try and work it out (as well as your own testing). Probably worth offering the customer something as a thank you for helping you with the problems etc.

[Mister B]

FWIW, I had a similar problem last week and it was caused by a cookie problem. That being said, I've just tried chekcing out on your site without any problem. Should just add though that when you tick the deliver to cardholder address, I still had to fill the same addres in for a secod time. Is this right?

Mister B

[J-Wholesale]

It's possible that the customer has cookies switched off in her browser, in which case there really isn't anything wrong with your shopping cart. This will kill most sessions, unless they also append the session ID to the URL (we don't). If she has switched off her cookies, then she needs to switch them back on. It's not realistic to expect eCommerce sites to work without cookies, and it's generally not worth the time to make them do so.

[lesliedocherty]

Hi Leslie,

I'm no expert but it sounds like it could be a cookies issue. Maybe try disabling cookies on a browser and see if you can replicate the problem.

Edit: I just tested it with cookies disabled in Firefox and that is what happens. Tell the customer she needs to set her browser to accept cookies if she wants to complete the order online.

Hi, thanks for that

[davidshaw89]

Since it has been noted that the issue was to do with cookies, I have a short message on the basket page, that I find eliminates most problems.

Just something like: "To use the shopping basket facility on this web site, you need to enable cookies. For more information on enabling cookies, click here. For information on how this affects your privacy click here"

The last sentence is important, since this links to the privacy policy - which some users will always worry about why you want them to enable cookies etc when they are currently disabled.