Cookies problems

[Raymond]

Is it possible for a shopping cart that functions well for most, but not for some?

I wrote my own shopping cart and I have been using it for over 3 years. Over the last 3 years I occasionally receive emails regarding my shopping bag not functioning, but I never gave much thought to them because these emails were quite rare. I usually just replied with an email telling them to enable cookies on their browsers.

But lately, I have been receiving these emails more often (at least once a week, from a pool of visitors of about 12000 uniques). This might not sound much, but I believe there could be alot more people are having problems but they just don't bother to email me about it.

I have already tested my shopping cart with most browsers that I could get my hands on (Firefox, IE 6, Opera, NS). I just can't seem to duplicate the problem.

Anyone experienced similar problems before?

[edited by: Raymond at 5:54 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2006]

[abbeyvet]

Ballpark guesses I have read for people browsing with cookies disabled is about 2-4%, and something similar for JS. Probably there is some overlap in the two groups.

So if either/both are required to use your site you can expect about 300-400 people a week to have problems on your site - though many of them will probably know how to accept cookies or enable JS as and when required - based on the premise that those who know how to turn them off are more likely than the average person to know how to turn them back on.

Let's say half do. That still leaves more than 100 confused costomers a week, and about 1 in 100 emailing seems about right to me.

Short of not requiring cookies, it's hard to see what to do. Those people must have problems with lots of carts.

[sja65]

What I have done in the past is have my customer service staff offer 5 or 10 dollars off an order if the customer will help find the bug. In every case except one for my shopping cart, the problem has been on their browser. In the one other situation, there was a bug in the mac version of IE where the form wasn't submitting properly. I know not many people probably use that version of the browser, but I enabled a workaround (and got an order out of the customer that commented about the problem).

[txbakers]

If the user is using Internet Explorer, check to see that they have the content advisor turned off:

Tools > Internet Options > Content

There is an MS bug that prevents Session cookies to load when this is enabled in Secure sites.

[jtara]

Do you realize that more and more users are turning off cookies? And that many major vendors now use other means to maintain shopping cart sessions for this reason?

At minimum, you need to have an error page if cookies are disabled.