Customers clean internet files and loose carts

[raf]

This is one of my biggest user issues for my Shopsite customers and I am wondering if anyone has the same problem or has found a solution.

I have customers who generate rather large orders and may take days, or even weeks, to create their order. They are constantly "loosing" their carts because they, or some one else, "cleans" their browsers by deleting the cookies and in effect removing their links to their Shopsite shopping carts.

Does anyone else have this problem and has anyone found a work-around to allow customers to retain, or recover, their Shopsite shopping cart link?

[Jim]

In a Pro level store you can set the length of time that uncompleted shopping carts are retained. The feature is found under Commerce Setup > Order System > Shopping cart and is called "Keep unfinished shopping carts:" The default is 7 days. So if the order in the shopping cart has not been completed in 7 days the cart file will be deleted. You can set this value from 1 to 99 days. If you have a lot of shoppers that have the problem of loosing their cart you may want to up the time to 14 or 21 days. However the longer the time that you allow the carts to remain the more space will be taken on the server. On a store that has hundreds or thousands of orders completed in a week the number of uncompleted order can be quite high. So you will need to balance the amount of disk space you have available with the seriousness of the lost shopping cart problem.

Manager and Starter level stores do not have this setting. So if you have one of those you would need to upgrade to the Pro level to add this functionality.

[raf]

The unfinished shopping cart expiration for our Shopsite store is has been set at 90 days for many years and we have excess disk space for storage of un-submitted carts.

The problem is that the customer, while cleaning their internet temporary files and cookies, removes the cookie from their system that identifies their SSMS file on our web server. In the past, I have emailed them the address to re-connect to their shopping cart but they can not contunue shopping because the cookie is missing from their system. This issue then requires them to either start their order from scratch, or even worse, abandon our site and go to another vendors website.

[Jim]

They should be able to bookmark the first screen of the shopping cart and then click on that bookmark to get back to the same cart. This should work until the shopping cart is either completed or the shoppiing basket file is cleaned up on the server because it has been longer than the time you set to keep the files.

[raf]

I will make that suggestion to my users. Is there anyway to re-establish the cookie if the user doesn't remember to bookmark the page? Also, is there anyway to forward the bookmark to another computer so the user can work on the order from multiple computers?

[loren_d_c]

The only way to 're-etablish the cookie' with the unique shopping cart ID is to go to the URL with that shopping cart ID in the parameter list, then the cookie should be set again.

If you have a Pro store, then there is a feature called Shopping Cart JavaScript Variables that puts info about the shopping cart (product info, cart totals, etc) into JavaScript variables so that you can use it in your own custom JavaScript. One of the variables available is ss_sbid which is the basket ID used to identify the shopper with their unique shopping cart files.

So you could use this to make some kind of visual reminder on your shopping cart screen (for shoppers with JavaScript enabled) of what the URL is for their specific cart. Here is a simple example (code untested):

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
document.write("Your Shopping Cart URL:<br>");
document.write("http://yourdomain.com/path/to/order.cgi?storeid=yourstoreid&function=show&sbid=" + ss_sbid);
</script>

Of course maybe someone who is more familiar with JavaScript could make a function that could actually add this URL as a bookmark to the shoppers browser if they clicked on it, or opened a new email in their email app with the URL to the cart pre-populated in the subject or body of the email, etc.

-Loren

[raf]

I have tested bookmarking the first page of the shopping cart and, unless there are browser version requirements, this process did not work.

I have used the java script you recommended to generate the address for the shopping cart. A sample format follows:

http://www.mystore.com/cgi-bin/sc/order ... 32231.1916

After inserting the address into the browser it does display the correct content for the shopping cart initially but if I try to add additional products to the shopping cart it discards the current content and creates a new cart.

Also, I am using Shopsite Pro Version 10.

[Jim]

What is an actual url that your created? There is evidently a domain called www.mystore.com and that store is not using ShopSite.

I emailed myself a link that I saved as a bookmark to a test store and opened that link in a different computer that had not been to the store and was able to view the cart and add products to the same cart.

[raf]

The actual site is protected using .htccess. An existing cart is:
http://www.rdcdealer.com/cgi-bin/sc/ord ... 32231.1916

I instruct my customers to log onto the site using their user name and password and then paste the cart address into the browser. This use to be an occasional problem but I am not receiving two or three requests weekly to "find" missing carts.