4 replies to this topic

[thx1138]

I received an e-mail from a slightly irritated customer this morning complaining that they weren't able to place their order on our site because their corporate firewall blocked all cookies (we use session cookies to store our shopping cart) and that we should 'fix' our site.

Now I can understand his irritation, however this is the first such complaint we've received in almost 10 years (though I'm aware other such users may simply toodle off to another site without complaining.)

Is using cookies in such a way considered poor form, should we be using a more sophisticated method? I had a quick look around and noticed many off the shelf carts do seem to use cookies.

I'm aware that I could be using PHP sessions in place of cookies but without knowing how many customers we may be losing it's difficult to know if the time and effort involved in implementing this is worth it.

Are there any statistics out there for the amount of users who have cookies disabled and is it considered important to now build sites without any reliance on cookies?

Charlie

[rolf]

I'm not sure if it's a problem to use cookies; I can see what you're saying and it makes sense, maybe it would be worth setting up your own script to log everyone that tries to use the shopping cart but has cookies blocked, and maybe also what they do after that?

[Randy]

It's a rare problem to run into, but I do see it from time to time.

A technical way you can deal with it is to use a session id in the url once someone is inside the cart if cookies are being blocked, rather than simply serving them an error page.

I handle it a much simpler way. I just got myself a toll free (in the US and Canada) number that costs me like $10 per month plus a little per minute and this number is listed on the Sales form where people would enter their information. This ends up killing two birds with one stone because it covers not only those folks who can't accept cookies, but also gives an easy ordering method for those folks who just don't feel comfortable ordering something onlne.

I get maybe 1 or 2 calls per week per site to place a phone order. The vast majority either don't like paying online or have a question they'd really like to have answered prior to buying. But there is the rare one (maybe one out of 50? Dunno, that's just an impression since I don't actively track it) who cannot accept cookies because of their security settings.

[thx1138]

Ok, thanks guys, so I shouldn't rush into a panic that I'm losing hundred of customers, cookies are still a valid technology on which to build a cart but I'll look at implementing another solution when I have time.

Charlie

[roxyyo]

One complaint after all this time is not that bad

An advantage of cookies over session IDs (if I'm not mistaken) is that you're less likely to have session ID'd URLs indexed by search engines creating duplicate content problems and ugly URLs appearing in search engines.