Best Way To Identify User / Shopping Cart

[Jason Burr]

I was wondering what the best approach to handling a shopping cart was. My
concerns

1. Cookies not accepted (session variables not maintained and setting
retreiving cookies doesn't work)
2. Use an IP (people behind firewalls or using NAT or other subrouting
appear as same client)
3. Use of GET (people can bookmark cart contents then return and an order
has been fuffilled but shows as new because contents of string are
bookmarked too)

Am I being dense here?

Thanks in advance for any useful comments.

 

[CJM]

For alternatives for storing sessio state:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=175167

I think the DB version is the most suited to your needs.

Use querystrings to pass a DB Session ID to each page:
//www.mysite.asp?sessionid=12345

Store this session information in a DB.

Regularly cleanout the Sessions table to delete old sessions. [Sessions that
are cobverted to orders are obvioulsy in a serperate table]

hth

Chris

 

[Aaron Bertrand - MVP]

I was wondering what the best approach to handling a shopping cart was. My

concerns

1. Cookies not accepted (session variables not maintained and setting
retreiving cookies doesn't work)

I always find this amusing. Do you think people who don't trust your site
enough to allow a session cookie, are going to fork over their credit card
information?

Anyway, see http://www.aspfaq.com/cart for a very simple example that does
not rely on cookies.

 

[Jason Burr]

The answer to that is a big yes. Alot of people install software that blocks
cookies and they are ignorant to it until sites dont work then they really
dont trust the site and its something that was their doing through
ignorance. I have had plenty of people come to me whining about that very
issue.

I know about the faq and have the example and that falls under my concern
about people behind a cable router using NAT etc. since the example seems to
use the ip of the user for identity. I didn't get in depth with it maybe I
missed something there.

 

[Aaron Bertrand - MVP]

I know about the faq and have the example and that falls under my concern

about people behind a cable router using NAT etc. since the example seems to
use the ip of the user for identity.

No, it does not. I believe it stores the IP address, but that is not used
to uniquely identify users - it is just for logging.