Cannot add more than one item to basket

[Joel E.]

About 3 years ago (mid-2011) we implemented a custom ajax enhancement to our cart. Ever since then (perhaps before, but I don't really recall), we have gotten occasional requests from customers, saying they have not been able to add more than 1 item to their cart. When they try to add another one, the first one disappears. It has only happened to a few of our customers, and I have only experienced the problem once. I have not figured out how to replicate the issue.

In searching the forums, I found a couple ancient threads that mentioned some others experiencing this type of problem, and the solutions offered were related to cookies being enabled. Yet that doesn't seem to solve our problem. We have generally suggested to our customers "clearing your browser cookies, switching to a different browser, or restarting your computer." Sometimes feedback says that worked, other times not. Several times it seemed to happen within a couple weeks after a customer placed an order; the first time worked fine, their next visit had this problem.

I'm bringing the issue up now because although it had been a low-pressure issue (~1 report a week), the problem has seemed to escalate after we recently upgraded from Update 6 > Update 12. Just today I got about half a dozen reports of the problem.

Our site is http://www.milestonebooks.com/

Thanks,
Joel

[Dan - Glendale Designs]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Wow, there is so much going on throughout your site in terms of AJAX, the break point could be in a number of places. Not a simple thing to diagnose with those customizations without some extensive digging. Highly recommend you get a developer involved, or the original developer, as I don't see this as something someone is going to weed through and diagnose for free via these forums.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Thanks for taking the time to look. We have an option to disable ajax and return to the "classic" cart, but even that hasn't seemed to solve the problem.

[Dan - Glendale Designs]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Check the cookie/store settings, test with IE8, see if there are any hard coded urls that fire non-www. vs. www. since you use that as the preferred throughout.

Also, certain internet security suites can play havoc with cookies by default. Have witnessed this as being the culprit in a couple cases.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Testing just now (via BrowserStack) on IE8/Win7 shows no significant issues. When I manually entered milestonebooks.com (non-www), the site forwarded to www.milestonebooks.com and showed my cart as empty. However, any subsequent links brought back the cart items. Our reporting shows that forwarding mostly occurs from external links pointing to outdated domain urls, and doesn't really indicate any correlation.

Also, we have some basic reports (started a week ago) on those who switch from ajax to non-ajax. This is an option suggested to those who are experiencing trouble with items not staying in the cart. (Some feedback also indicates account login status is also lost, which sounds likely if cookies are the culprit.) These reports don't indicate whether the change to "classic" non-ajax made the cart usable or not, but they do show the change is spread across all major browsers and mostly current versions, and is fairly representative of our visitors as a whole.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

One other thing I should mention is that while the uptick in problems happened since our Miva upgrade (about 2 weeks ago), it may well have been triggered by some other changes that happened about a week ago, which included upgrading Google analytics to the new "universal" analytics code.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

This problem has been quite a little irritation over the past several weeks. Where would I find a developer who is competent in Miva, Javascript/JQuery, and hopefully PHP, who we can hire to investigate the problem?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

I'd ask either Dan at Glendaledesigns.com or Andreas at Pcinet.com (we is a tad too busy ATM).

[BkraM]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Those sound like the same symptoms we had and it was a cookie problem. If the problem only occurs in IE and Safari it may be the same. Do you use any sub domains other than www that might get/have a duplicate cookie?

http://extranet.mivamerchant.com/for...=domain+cookie

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Thanks for the suggestion. I am suspecting it is a cookie problem. However, unlike your situation, it occurs with all four major browsers. (We do have subdomains, but Miva is only running on www.) The only time the symptom happened on my machine (~a couple years ago), I recall fixing it by deleting some cookies. However, although this method has appeared to work with some of our visitors, others report failure no matter if they delete cookies or switch to another browser! I'm not knowledgeable enough with Miva to know how to systematically isolate the problem.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

I think you will find its an issue with yourdomain.com verses www.yourdomain.com...they set different sets of cookies. Since there is no useful reason to allow this, fix that problem first by having everyone reach and navigate your site by either www. or just domain.com.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

I've reproduced the problem again, and have a few more clues:

I placed an order. Then I navigated back to the home page, but this time it was https. (The store pages are accessible via http or https, but default to http until checkout.) Now I noticed that items won't stay in the cart, and I find that I have a cookie 'mm5-RS-basket_id' that is HttpOnly, and another 'htscallerid' that is not HttpOnly. When I switched to http, items stayed in my cart, and when I switched back to https, they still stayed, so some cookie setting must have been triggered when I switched protocols.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Recent testing:

If the mm5-[storecode]-basket-id cookie is not set, or expired (which seems to happen after checkout), and a visitor browses the site via secure https, the cookie will not be regenerated, and the shopping cart fails. As soon as a non-secure page (http) is hit, the basket-id cookie is set, and now both non-secure and secure pages work for adding items to the cart.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

There's a couple of ways to fix this issue. The "easiest" one that will solve your problem in the short run is to go to Global Settings -> Domain Settings -> Cookie Settings

And change the radio button to: Set on both HTTP and HTTPS connections, without secure flag

This might cause your PCI Scanner (if you have one) to choke on it and it's not ideal, but it will solve your problem until you fix your link structures so this doesn't happen anymore.

[Joel E.]

Re: Cannot add more than one item to basket

Thanks for the tip. Is the recommended setting to force http requests over to https so the whole site runs with secure cookies?