Shopping Basket empties itself

[johns4y]

www.jaysmodelkits.com / ZC 1.5.7d / PHP 7.4.33

I have received an email from a customer who states that whilst browsing the store the shopping basket kept emptying, it happened twice.
Whilst browsing and selecting items to put in to the basket he spent time away from the computer to check something and came back to find the basket was empty. Total time period spent was 1 to 2 hours from the time he started browsing.
Sounds to me like ZenCart has a time out feature which seems to empty the basket of items when a certain length of inactivity has been reached.
Is this correct? and, if so, what is the time limit set to and can it be changed? Fortunately the customer was persistent and refilled his basket for a third time. But, I can see this could annoy some people leading to lost custom.
Thanks in advance.

[swguy]

> Sounds to me like ZenCart has a time out feature which seems to empty the basket of items when a certain length of inactivity has been reached.

The customer's session does time out after a while. You can modify the file define_shopping_cart.php in Admin > Tools > Define Pages editor to say something like:

--
Please sign in to see your stored shopping cart or create an account if you do not have one. Your items will be cleared from your cart after *** minutes of inactivity if you are not logged in.

---

To get the value of *** go to the Version screen and look at session.gc_maxlifetime.

[johns4y]

Thank you for that. Under session.gc_maxlifetime there are two values. I assume these are in seconds making the timeout limit as 15 minutes and 24 minutes. What is the difference between Local Value and Master Value? And can they be altered to a longer period, say 1 hour?

[swguy]

Some hosting environments allow you to change this and others don't. Try setting the define SESSION_TIMEOUT_CATALOG.

Create the file includes/extra_configures/session_timeout.php

<?php
define('SESSION_TIMEOUT_CATALOG','3600');

and see if that works.

[johns4y]

Thanks for the suggestion I have created the new file and also discovered the files which includes the settings for the timeout period.
I have altered those figures also to 3600 (1 hour). I tested it and it would seem the shopping basket now retains it's contents for what seems to be well over an hour.
So, I would say the problem has been solved. Many thanks for your help.