Magento Checkout redirects to “Shopping cart is empty” page and clears cart in IE7 & IE8

Question

After adding products to the shopping cart and clicking “Checkout”, the OnePage Checkout page opens. It allows you to select whether to check out as a Guest or Registered User. After you have selected an option, it briefly shows up the “Billing Details” pane, before suddenly redirecting to another page which displays the message “Shopping Cart is empty”, and any items you had in your cart are removed. This problem is only occurring in Internet Explorer 8 and below. Website URL is http://tastesfromaroundnz.co.nz . Cookie lifetime is set to 86400, and all of the Session Validation Settings are set to “No”. Magento version is 1.6.2

Anyone able to help us with this problem? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

SOLVED: This is due to the cookie problem, not in browser but in Magento itself. In Magento, by default cookie’s lifetime is set to 3600 (1 hour). But if the end users computer time runs ahead of server’s time, cookies will not get set for magento frontend as well as backend. For example, end user’s computer time is 1 hour forward than server’s time, that means the cookie (holding user’s session id) will expire as soon as user logs in or tries to add an item.

To solve this, set cookie’s lifetime to 86400 (1 day) instead of 1 hour and everything will work as expected. You can also set cookie lifetime to 0, so that cookie will only expire when the user’s browser is closed.

Go to: Magento backend -> Sytem -> Configuration -> Web -> Session and Cookie Management Set cookie lifetime to 86400 and save. Everything will work as expected now.