Hi,

So I did some testing and found that the cart items stick for more than 24 hours if you are an anonymous user. There is a setting in AbleCommerce for anonymous user maintenance on the Configure > Store > Maintenance page, so I believe this determines how long the information is kept.

Now, if you are a registered user shopping while logged in and then the session times out, the cart items are saved and will be shown when the user logs back in.

If you are a registered user with existing items in the cart, logout, add items to the cart, and then log back in - the cart is combined with items from both shopping sessions. A message is shown so the user knows what happened:



Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for pointing this out, Ray.

The timeout can be changed in web.config but PCI does require 20 minutes.

Here is the line if you want to change it:

Thank you for responding and confirming my suspicions. Came across the web.config settings shortly after I posted.

I was thinking about carts for other etailers, and in most situations I don't think my cart contents disappear when my authenticated session ends.

For instance, on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, etc... I add stuff to my cart, login to checkout, then get distracted and don't complete the purchase. A couple days later, I go back and it still has my cart and shows my name, but if I try to access profile info or checkout it makes me enter my password again.

I'm pretty sure changing this behavior would be a pretty massive undertaking.