Shopping Cart Help

SWOL250

Hey everyone, recently I had a company design and build a website and shopping cart for me. SInce going live, I have received tons of emails from customers saying that when they get to the shopping cart, it appears empty. My question is this, what other ways are there to design a shopping cart so that it doesnt have to use cookies? Obviously I am not a computer guy, but I am in need of some major help. The company who did it for me, has been "fixing it" since monday and the only thing different is a tiny window pops up and says "enable cookies". My concern is that not everyone knows how to enable cookies on their computers. How can I get them to make this site more user friendly? Thanks for any help you can offer. I really appreciate it.

dalecosp

Do you know if the shopping cart system was built using PHP? (That might be important at a forum named PHPBuilder...) 😉

PHP supports "Transparent Sessions," in which the Session_ID (the long, seemingly random number by which the server identifies clients) is propagated either via cookies or via the URL itself. So, if a user of a shopping cart had cookies turned off, the server would automagically append the Session ID number to the url as the user clicked to view his/her cart, and the receiving cart script should correctly identify which list of items to associate with this particular client request.

That said, there are a whole host of reasons why the carts might be empty. I assume, from your comments, that a customer who uses the cart system with cookies enabled doesn't face this issue?

Of course, another question would be "why do so many people have cookies disabled?" Or, more likely, some dumb anti-cookie SW on their systems, anyway...

Doubt this is much help, but hope that it might be, somehow ...

🙂

kamy99

Get them to use Sessions.
It doesn't require any action from the customers , and it's browser independent.

Hope This Helps

SWOL250

so if the designers used session cookies even if the custmers had their cookies disabled it would still work right? If it would work, what kind of proccess is it to change the cart from how it is now?

dalecosp

Originally posted by SWOL250
so if the designers used session cookies even if the custmers had their cookies disabled it would still work right? If it would work, what kind of proccess is it to change the cart from how it is now?

"Session Cookies" is a misnomer. The session file itself is kept on the server in a temporary directory. But, each session file has to be matched to the browser that the data came from. There are only two ways that the server can keep track of the client's sessions --- one is by setting a cookie on the client machine, and the other is via propagation via the URL (web address). My guess (you still haven't said for sure that they are using PHP...) is that their server is not set to use transparent sessions, therefore the server can't tell which browser is which customer if the cookies are blocked... 🙁

If they're using PHP, then enabling transparent session support would be a matter of changing one line in the php.ini file and restarting the web server. Of course, it may not be that simple for them ... do they own the server, for example?

As for the question of how difficult it is to change things, it is hard to know the answer to that without seeing the code. One thing that is frustrating on small jobs is that a paradigm or design for the project is thought of, (sometimes even written down), and then the client desires more features or functionality added to the site during cleanup/debug/presentation work; this can be frustrating for the programmer.

OTOH, a problem such as you describe should probably been thought of a long time before the deployment of the site. I'd be falling all over myself to fix things if you were my client and I thought my code was denying you business ....

SWOL250

To be honest this is all greek to me. I dont know if they used php or not. They own the servers. Ive been trying to get them to fix this all week. I am trying to find out what I should do, or what to tell them to help them fix it right. I just want my customers to be able to go on and buy whatever they want, without having to worry about changing their cookie settings. I dont know if sessions would fix it or not. I dontk now what to tell them needs to be done. Shouldnt they know? I get the feeling they may not know as much as they should.

dalecosp

That's not a good feeling to have ...

Do you mind sharing the URL of the site?

SWOL250

the link to the company that built everything is
http://ns2.ccdrive.com/jungledev/webdesign.html

dalecosp

Well, LOL, interesting. Could be worse, I guess...

Netcraft reports that your site, PP, is running on Windows 2000/IIS 5. No mention of PHP, but who knows for sure... ns2.ccdrive.com is running Linux, Apache 1.3.12 (old!!) PHP 4.0.0 and ApacheJServer 1.1.2 ...

The frame source (where the buy! buttons are), points to a folder called "servlets" on ns2.ccdrive.com. Now, "servlets" are generally a Java concept, so I'm guessing that they used the JServer technology to do your shopping cart. So, whatever we may have discussed here may not help much 🙁

I'm not sure what to advise you to do. Make them aware that they're denying you online business and you wish they weren't, and nose about for someone else if your investment isn't too large might be an idea.

G'luck....

SWOL250

so in regards to my problem, based on what you saw with their site, is their nothing that can be done?

SWOL250

I did pay them to do the shopping cart, should I just go with another hosting company, that offers free shopping cart solutions? How difficult is it to switch my site to another company?

dalecosp

Depends on who owns the code....