Tracking the cart by IP address -vs- using session cookies. As you know, we have to track the cart with the user. There are only 2 ways to do this. One is by using the IP Address and the other is by using a "Session" cookie. Unfortunitly there are drawbacks to each of these methods. IP ADDRESS: Using the ip address is the preferred method because many users turn off cookies in there browsers. There are, however, 2 problems with tracking with the IP address. 1. If two or more people are accessing your site from behind a firewall, they will be using the same IP address and when items are added to the cart, by any of those users, they will see each others cart items. This happens most when you are testing. You are usually talking with a co-worker about the site and you both access it at the same time. However, you would have to agree that it would be very unusual for 2 customers, with the same IP, shopping your site at the same time in real life. We have ALOT of sites using Quikstore and the only time someone complains about this is during the setup/test phase of the program. This should give you an indication of what I described above. 2. AOL, in their latest wisdom, have been using variable IP's. This means that in the middle of surfing the web, the ip switches automatically during the session. As you can tell, this can be a problem. However, the only thing that might happen is that they lose the items in their cart. Because this does not change every minute or even every few minutes, it is reasonably unlikey that it will cause a problem. COOKIES: Using cookies is one of the most common ways to track the user in any shopping environment. However, some people do turn them off. While Quikstore allows you to track the cart using cookies, we recommend that you also do this test below to make sure the cookies are turned on in the users browser before you rely soley on cookie tracking. Add this in the index page of your site. Put the META tag below inside the tags of the page. Next, add this small javascript in the tags: Then, in the tag of the page, add this: This will check to make sure that session cookies are turned on in the users browser. That is if they also have Javascript turned on??? SUMMARY: While both methods provide a good way to track the cart_id, the IP Address method, in our opinion, is the best method. This is because we believe it is the lessor of 2 evils. They both have drawbacks...