Shopping cart error in IE only

your cart is empty only in explorer

[davereed]

My son has written a basic shopping cart for me that works fine in Chrome or Firefox when sending to Paypal. Unfortunately Internet explorer comes up with the message: 'Error detected. Your cart is empty'.

Anyone any idea what can be the cause of this? I presume I'm not the first person to encounter this problem?

Thanks

[lammert]

Hi davereed, first of all Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Shopping carts often use cookies to temporarily store information in the browser. The first thing you should therefore do is to see if cookies accidentally have been disabled in the browser.

You can check the cookie settings (at least in IE8) in Tools->Internet Options->Privacy

[davereed]

No cookies have been set within the code which has been written from the ground up. It's a very basic shopping cart written in javascript and PHP. We are only selling various amounts of one item with differing postal costs. It just seems odd that Chrome and Firefox have no problem with it. I just don't know where to find out what can be causing the error. Anymore ideas or know of somewhere I can find someone who may be able to help?

Thanks for your response.

[Staffa]

When using Internet explorer, you might want to look at the source code of the page which links to Paypal to see if the info is there, or have your code (temporarily) write on the page what it should send to Paypal. Since you don't use cookies the info has to be somewhere to be transferred.

If in Internet explorer nothing shows then step back page by page until you find where the info stops being passed on, that should give you a clue as to what happens.

[rocknbil]

I tend to agree with Brett's response in the other thread, the Javascript is probably broken for IE and the cart relies on it for proper functioning. Disable Javascript temporarily, get the cart working again without Javascript, and I'll bet IE will have no problem with it.

Then you can re-add the JS bits to enhance the user experience, which is what it's for.

Another possibility - validate all page output. [validator.w3.org]. If you have, say, an improperly nested form,

<table>
<form> <!-- oops -->
<tr><td> blah </td></tr>
</table>
</form>

It may not be posting properly. This is a long shot but I've seen it happen, you need to validate for cross browser compatibility anyway (or close to it.)

[davereed]

Thanks for your help everyone. I validated the site through 'validator'
and found the problem (There were endtags missing). Everything now seems to be working fine.