Shopping Cart Expiring

[andres.choi]

I have a few customers telling me that after x amount of time, their shopping cart would empty so they would not be able to checkout. I would find them under not completed orders. I tried following the link generated in the emails to finish the checkout process, but the link will redirect to a page that says there's no items in the cart again...

Am I missing something here? Is there a setting that can allow the system to save shopping carts for a longer period of time, let say a day or a week? I wasn't able to find this anywhere...

Any thought? Anyone else had a similar experience before with other customers?

Thanks

[Mark]

Is this related to the "cache" and "clear cache" settings or is this related to cookies?

[JustPoppin]

Same thing happened just today to 2 customers. This was the first time we experienced this.

[Mark]

wow i hope this isn't an issue.
Also, does this affect the email and link back to uncompleted orders?

[JustPoppin]

Not sure.

Went into incomplete orders, followed the links and saw the order, saw what was in the cart, looked at the statistics, etc.

Went back a bit later to follow up with the customer but, the cart was empty and neither I nor the customer had gone back to the cart since originally abandoned.

Happened with another one too today.

[cekman]

This has happened to me just a few times very recently. I submitted a ticket today because a customer complained that they lost an order that they had spent hours on and they didn't want to redo it.

I had actually looked at their order a few hours before they sent their email.

According to the customer - the cart was cleared when they went to create a customer account - but I haven't verified that as the actual cause.

I hope this gets resolved very quickly.

[cekman]

Here is the response I got on this from Tech Support

Anytime someone shops on your site, adds an item to cart a small cookie which stores their contents on their cart on their local computer. That cookie has to remain on their computer or their cart will empty. Usual cause of this happening is someone clearing out their cookies in the browser, or a program that runs that automatically does this. Otherwise our system will not clear that cookie unless they finish checking out and pay. Unfortunately we can not control the browsers/computers that browse your cart to make sure that they do not remove the cookies. If you see this happen you can find those carts in Orders > Not Completed as well as anyone else's that was shopping in your cart. Be careful to not remove any of these not completed orders also as that can also cause problems for the end users, those automatically clear out after 30 days.

Makes sense - however the 'missing' order was NOT in our incomplete orders. I also had another customer who was having trouble paying with PayPal - and I sent her the email from Incomplete Orders so she could try again - but low and behold that order had disappeared also.

I didn't delete either of them and noone else has access to my admin panel - so not sure what's going on.

Between PayPal not working correctly at times and people losing their orders I'm getting a little nervous.

Hoping it's a fluke.