When you are configuring the eCart object you have a choice of using sessions or cookies to store the cart info. Do you have sessions set for this value? Have you tried uploading these files to a live server to see if you have the same result? If you have your cart set to use sessions and you can confirm that sessions are working on your server then the cart should retain it's contents while the session is active. Do you have the cart page set as the redirect in the add to cart server behavior? If so you should be going directly to this page, is this when you see the cart without anything in it? Please post back with all of the detail that you can about this and include a copy of the add to cart page, your cart display page, and the WA_eCart folder from your site root in a zip archive. I will take a look at your pages locally.
