Basket stays empty

[sanafshan]

After customer selects product and proceeds to secure checkout by logging in to his/her account, the basket page shows up with the message : your basket is empty.
Any idea why this is happening? I have not editted any files within MIVA and am using the software's own menu bar.
Miva Merchant version is 4.13

 

[foxdev]

I've seen this before at my store, but I don't remember the cause. Could it be that they have cookies turned off? --------------

http://www.lowcostprints.com

 

[sanafshan]

Thanks for your input, I checked the browser settings and the cookies are enabled.

 

[foxdev]

Oddly, the very next day, I had a customer with this problem.

Conventional wisdom is that the problem is usually a link that includes a session ID. IOW, if you have a link on one of your static pages or someone sends someone else an e-mail with a URL to your site that includes a session ID, that can screw things up.

But sometimes the order can go through if you bring up the Shopping Cart list before going on to Check Out, but if you go directly to Check Out, it gives the "empty basket" error message.
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http://www.lowcostprints.com

 

[sanafshan]

I understand that the menu items in the MM menu bar are "hard coded" (factory settings) by MIVA.This problem about session ID or the basket disppearing at checkout occurs when users "code" their own button links to the various MM functions in the headers of the store pages and disable the MM own menu bar. In my particular case the original MIVA menu is being used and I do not know why the "hard coded" links are not working the way they should.
Should I ask my ISP to re-install the factory MIVA software from scratch on their server which has my account?

 

[foxdev]

I wouldn't go that far, at least not yet. I was referring to hard-coded URLs with session IDs in them that may have been accidentally used on the static non-Miva pages, such as the index.html.

My customer who had the "basket is empty" problem yesterday retried, and it worked. Based on his comments and some other clues, I think what happened was that his basket timed-out. He had put some items in his basket, then wrote an e-mail to us asking about shipping, then only after he got the response did he try to check out.

Our basket timeout value is set to 60 minutes, which is pretty reasonable. In his case, it was many hours between the time he started adding basket items until he went to check out. --------------

http://www.lowcostprints.com

 

[sanafshan]

Eureka! The culprit was "bad code" (have'nt found it yet) in the header of MM pages. When I removed all code from the headers and footers and reverted to basically the original Miva (vanilla) look, the problem no longer showed up.