The Shopping Cart & Cookies |
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First of all, if you have any type of problem using my website, please let me know. I am always seeking to improve the site.
The first time you use the shopping cart on a particular computer, your browser may ask you if it may accept the "cookie". It will probably only not ask if you have already set the browser to "accept all" or "deny all" cookies.
If you click on a "Buy It" button, it should put the item into your shopping cart. If you then click on one of the shopping cart picture icons, you can see the contents of your shopping cart. If there is nothing in your shopping cart at that point, then the situation is extremley unusual.
The shopping cart system uses a "cookie" (a silly name) to connect the data in the shopping cart on my server with who you are, i.e. your computer. That "cookie" is recorded as a small plain text file on your computer. This is typical of virtually all simple shopping cart systems. The "cookie" that I use does NOT record any personal information about you -- it does not even know your name.
If you use different computers at home and work, they will have different shopping carts -- the cookie on each computer connects one specific computer to one specific shopping cart. (Thus from a different computer you can not see the contents of a shopping cart created on another computer.)
Public computers (airports, cafes, libraries) are supposed to delete all cookies between users, thus you are usually not able to go back to a shopping cart session on a public computer once you have left that session.
If at any time, on that computer, you have instructed your browser to deny cookies from www.JaySmith.com, you will not be able to shop on my website until you set your browser to allow cookies from www.JaySmith.com.
Because I don't know what browser any individual is using and I don't have access to all browsers for testing, I can't easily give explicit instructions. However...
Open up a browser window and go to http://www.JaySmith.com. I believe that if you look in the lower right corner of the browser window itself (i.e in the border of the window), you may see an icon relating to cookies. If you hover over the icon with your mouse pointer, text may appear which may say if your browser is accepting or rejecting cookies from www.JaySmith.com. If you click the icon you may have the option to change it to accepting cookies from www.JaySmith.com.
If that does not work, try looking for the cookie file itself -- it is possible that something has corrupted that file. Somewhere under your browsers menus, perhaps under Tools or Edit... Preferences, there is a menu item in your browser menu relating to one of Cookies, Cookie Manager, Security Settings, Temporary Internet Files, or something like that. Under IE, I think the cookies are under Security Settings and are called Temporary Internet Files. You should be able to view the list of such files/cookies. Find the one for www.JaySmith.com. If such a file is present, but the shopping cart is not working, then delete the www.JaySmith.com cookie file.
Alternatively, there may be a list of DENIED/DISALLOWED cookies. You do NOT want www.JaySmith.com to be in that list. You DO want it to be in the ALLOWED list.
Once that cookie file has been removed, if you do find and remove it, and/or you instruct your browser to allow cookies from www.JaySmith.com, try shopping on www.JaySmith.com again. When you click on the FIRST "Buy It" button, it should attempt to set a cookie. For the shopping cart to work, you must ALLOW that cookie if it asks you. If the response page says that your browser is not allowing cookies from www.JaySmith.com, you must do whatever you would normally do in your browser to remove www.JaySmith.com from that DENIED/DISALLOWED list and then to allow that cookie.
If you do ever run into problems using my website, please email with full information about the problem, your computer operating system version, and your browser name and version. I will help if I can.
Disclaimer: As with anything that has to do with computers, things can go wrong. Do not attempt anything with which you are not comfortable. One should always have backups of data (every year several clients bemoan their lost data). |