Cookies, cookies and more cookies...

[bikersbits]

Hi, see if I can use the wisdom and experience of all of you please :wink:
We get lots of visitors on our site, and I was just amazed at the high number of user that can't actually go through the whole buying process because of the high level of security on their system that prevents our cookie getting in their system, or because their system has too many cookies or viruses and our system won't allow them access.
Do I make sense?
Anyway, I've tried to solve the problem by adding an help page with a couple of links to free programs that clean the users system from viruses and cookies, but customers don't tend to search for a problem solver. some tend to just give up and phone their order through, but I want to find a solution so I can catch those customers who simply give up and blame our system as being useless.
Any suggestions and advice would be greatly appreciated as I find this problem a very frustrating one.
Many thanks
Roberta
www.bikerbits.com

[Rob Holmes]

Hi,

You could stop using cookies.

If thats not an option I would get your shopping cart to only use session cookies and record all the customers details before they run into cookie problems, then at least you can follow up if you don't see an order go all the way through.

I have a client who specialises in this sort of thing if you need indepth programming help.

Rob

[Ozzy]

I agree with Rob, use session rather than cookies.
I had teh same problem with my website a couple of years ago and changed it from using Cookies to Sessions and almost all problems just disappeared!

[Rob Holmes]

Hi

Actually - the second option of recording the visitors details at each step of the way is a great backup to do anyway and you'll be able to monitor drop off's right the way up to payment.

Also keep an eye on your website statistics and if you've got a good stats package that identifies and tracks unique visitors then it's well worth spending some time on it once a month (or per 1000) unique visitors.

Rob

[benmcclaren]

Hi,

I've had a lot of involvement with this kind of thing recently during the development of an e-Commerce site. This is more of an issue in later versions of Internet Explorer which blocks cookies if the the browser doesn't consider them to be safe.

What you need to do is to create a P3P privacy policy which describes the nature of your business and the reasons for which you are using cookies. This can be done using one of many tools (I used IBM's P3P Policy Editor http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/p3peditor ) which will create a privacy poilcy in English (which visitors can view on your site) as well as a machine readable version which allows browsers to do the same. By stating in the privacy policy the reasons for your cookies you can tell the browser that the cookies are safe and it will accept them. It's a bit complicated to create but if done properly all of your cookie problems can be solved!

If you need any tips on doing this send a reply and I'll see what I can do and possibly send you an example policy which you can load into the tool to work from.

Thanks,

Ben McClaren

[bikersbits]

Thanks everyone, your help is really appreciated.
At least now I've got some ideas on what to work on.
Cheers
Roberta
www.bikersbits.com

[Ozzy]

Thanks Ben, a great post and a real help. I'm looking through the P3P site now :)

(although I have edited your post to remove the ) from the url so it works ;))