Product not appearing in cart (bluehost)

[bluegiraffe85]

Hi,

I am attempting to help troubleshoot an issue with a client’s site.

I had set her up with eStore last year and all worked fine… however, I was using simple buy now buttons instead of using a shopping cart.

She now wants to offer coupons so have switched to add to cart buttons.

The problem is that when you click on the button, the product doesn’t get added to the cart. I have it set to redirect to the checkout page and have the short code on there – in fact, when you click the button, you do land on the checkout page, but it says your cart is empty.

After searching this forum, it looked most likely to be a php set up issue that her host needed to resolve. the client contacted her host — bluehost — and they were quite helpful. However, the issue is not resolved. According to them, they need more information that this:

Occasionally a server may not have it’s PHP session configured correctly. Please note that you won’t be able to use a shopping cart software without the PHP session working correctly. It is your hosting provider’s responsibility to give you a server where the PHP session is setup properly. Contacting your hosting provider and requesting them to fix it is a good idea.

Making the PHP session to work is not very hard. You mainly have to make sure the following two things are in place:

1) Check if your server’s PHP config is set to allow sessions.

2) Check to make sure the session save path has been configured correctly. This is just a matter of adding a line similar to the following in the php.ini file:

session.save_path = /tmp

It is best to contact your hosting provider so they can do this for you. All you have to do is request them to fix the PHP session issue on your server and they should know what to do.

Which I pulled from elsewhere on the forum. They are saying that “they are not being provided with enough information to fix this. Need to know what location it needs to be pointed to. By default, it is set up to accept sessions.”

The site I’m working with is [http://naturallyprosperous.com]

I have pulled the add to cart buttons so that people can purchase the client’s class. I can put them back for you if it will help trouble-shoot this problem.

Thanks for the help!

[admin]

Hi, Usually one of the two things will cause this issue:

1) You have a bad plugin or theme that is destroying your PHP session

2) PHP session on this server is not configured correctly so the sesssion is not working.

It is really your hosting provider’s duty to give you a server where PHP session is working correctly. This is not something your plugin developer can help you with. We try to give you as much info we can but a server’s basic configuration can only be addressed by your hosting provider. If you look at this post you will see that each and every user who had this issue it always turned out that the hosting company had to fix their server configuration to address the PHP session issue:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/php-session-not-working-correctly

Before you go back to your hosting provider, I would like to confirm that the issue is indeed coming from your PHP session. Please provide a link to a page where you have an add to cart button so I can do a quick test (I went the link you shared earlier but couldn’t find an add to cart button).

[bluegiraffe85]

I’ve switched all of the buttons to buy now so the client can sell her items, but this page has a add to cart button that you can test:

[http://naturallyprosperous.com/button-test/]

I’m not asking you to fix this — I understood from reading the forum that it is likely a hosting company problem. However, I don’t know enough about PHP to explain to the hosting support people what else they need to do to fix this. So what I’m asking from you is to 1. verify that it is indeed a php issue and therefore the hosting company’s issue, and 2. give me some more details that I can pass along so they can accurately fix the problem.

The hosting company said, “the account is set up to accept sessions” which seems to be the equivalent of “it should work.” But it doesn’t work and I need help explaining what could be not working. Simply assuming that they “know how to fix the issue” isn’t helping my client.

Thanks for ANY additional light you can shine on this issue.

[admin]

Thank you for the link. I can confirm that the PHP session is not working correctly on this site or the session is getting destroyed by another plugin.

Tell your hosting provider the following:

When a value is saved in the PHP Session, it loses the value (the session values are not getting stored like it is suppose to)

There are a few bad WordPress plugins out there that can destroy your PHP session incorrectly so make sure to do this test first before going to your host:

Theme and plugin conflict test – https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/test-to-identy-a-conflicting-theme-or-plugin

List of plugins that don’t play nice – https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/list-of-plugins-that-dont-play-nice-conflicting-plugins

[bluegiraffe85]

It turned out to be a plugin conflict.

I had already looked at your list of problem plugins and had also deactivated the plugins in the account that I didn’t recognize. However, at your suggestion, I went ahead and deactivated all but the shopping cart plugins.

And discovered that one of the plugins that I had installed was the problem. Download Manager.

With the features in eStore, the client no longer needs this plugin anyway, so it’s no big loss.

Thanks again for your awesome support (even when the problem isn’t yours).

[wpCommerce]

Hi, it’s good to hear that the shopping cart is working for you.

[Author]

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