Experiencing random logouts

[dspeak35640]

I have been online since 2008. I used oscommerce V2.2RCC.

I had built my sales up to $12K to $15 a month. Was doing good, but the site was dated and the version no longer supported by oscommerce. It was heavily modified with the core code having lots of modification.

I wanted to upgrade, but at the time, Oscommerce did not even provide most of the basic modules for their upgraded versions. So I found zencart, love it, plugins are easy, I was able to give my site a fresh look and be responsive.

Problem is, my sales are down to next to nothing. I have sold less than $2K this month. I know that all my product links on the search engines refer back to the oscommerce links and are not valid. I was getting 404 errors. I changed it so 404 would redirect to my advanced search page.

I am not getting the hits, and especially the sales.

I am worried that something is going on when people attempt to purchase, such as they are being looped back and not able to complete the sale. I have this problem in the admin login sometime. It is frustrating when trying to update a product and when you hit update, it loops back to admin login and you lose everything, I am afraid this is happening to customers on checkout, although I have not duplicated that when logging in as a customer and making a purchase.

Just really frustrated right now. I love zencart, but afraid I made a mistake.

[mc12345678]

The loop back within the admin is more than likely related to the 15 minute (typically that long but can be set to a smaller time) timeout that occurs while editing product info.

Two generally accepted methods to overcome this: install the keep alive timer or mark up your content outside of the admin and then copy and paste that content (preferably from a plain text editor) into the appropriate fields.

There is also Easy Populate v4 which would allow population of a large amount of information into the cart.

As to the sales/404 issue, in the transition you would want to have your previous uris redirected to the previously existing product that is now on your new store, though I say that with a heavy grain of concern.

[dspeak35640]

Thank you for the response.

The admin loopback does not always occur. But when it does it is frustrating and it not due to a time out.

I can login, immediately click on whos online, it will take me back to the login. I log in and it takes me to the whos online. I click on categories, I go to admin log in again. I log in, I am taken to categories. It is like this, on and on. At other times it works fine.

As for sales, I am seeing several people log in, have items in their cart, go to checkout, then go no further. Very frustrating for such a good program.

[DrByte]

If you or your customers are being prematurely logged out then that's probably related to a server misconfiguration whereby sessions/cookies aren't interacting properly.

You'll only get logged out like that if Zen Cart can't match up the incoming session ID (from your browser's cookies) with its existing session records (in the database, stored/updated with every click). There's more written about that in the FAQs area here, but typical causes of that are server-out-of-disk-quota-storage-space, or corrupted database, or incorrectly changed-from-defaults sessions configuration settings in your admin, or odd redirects configured in apache, or weird non-default PHP settings that are interfering, and sometimes issues with SSL not properly configured.
It wouldn't surprise me that if you've had your host make a bunch of tweaks to apache/php for your old site that those might be messing with the new software.
Lots of things you can look into ;)