1 reply to this topic

[CaliforniaGirl]

Thank you in advance for your help.

I have a client who has gone through the process of URL rewriting to avoid dynamic URL's and session ID's. However, they have raised a question for which I need some guidance.

Once a user places something in the shopping cart they are then issued a session id. Ideally this needs to be kept through the purchasing cycle. However, if the user clicks on the navigation they then lose the assigned id due to the implementation of SE friendly URLs.

I would have said that once a user begins shopping the site should be on an https that is blocked by the robots file therefore making SE friendly URLs irrelevant. Or, perhaps use server-side session ids? My knowledge of shopping carts and their implementation is minimal (which may be apparent here) so any advice would be greatly accepted.

Thanks,
CaliforniaGirl

[Randy]

I'm not sure I'm understanding the question, but it sounds like you've run up against a bad implementation of someone trying to use so called search engine friendly URLs.

Two things. With a typical shopping cart adding an item to the cart basket is going to be done through a <form> link. This is the correct way to do it since spiders do not submit forms. It both keeps them out of the Cart/Basket section of the site and also keeps the webmaster from seeing failed shopping attempts that look like cart abandonment. A side benefit is that it keeps the spiders from getting those SID urls while real users have a tracking component that is necessary to the sales process.

Then normally once a real user adds something to their cart the coding of the site should keep them in this section. There should be no chance of them being able to go back to the non-tracking side of things without using their back button.

It sounds like the 2nd part of this equation is failing because of the way the back end coding of the site is being handled. In a nutshell someone is going to need to tweak the cart code so that once a person adds an item to their cart they are then locked into the cart. There are several ways to do this, one of which you mentioned if you can use HTTPS to provide a different user navigation scheme.