Cart empties upon checkout

I found a thread where people were having a similar problem, but there really was no solutin posted: showthread.php?t=4652&highlight=cart+empties+checkout

This has been a random issue for me. When one hits checkout from the cart page, the page is re-directed to the cart and is empty rather than going forward to checkout. When it has happened previously, I've re-uploaded the cart and checkout page and the problem seems to go away. But what does this keep happening?

Please help. www.julesseltzer.com

Edit: This isn't a random problem, but seems to not happen on every computer. But it happens 100% of the time on the machines that have the problem. It is going from non-secure to secure pages. For now, I've bypassed the secure pages hoping no one will notice. Please help asap. I've attached some page that might help solve the issue. I did try the solutions from the above post, but nothing seemed to work for me.

Edit: I changed my strategy. I made all pages SSL for now.

usually, when the cart clears on checkout, it happens because of switching the domain.

thew cart items are stored in a session. The session is tied to the domain and a cookie.

if a user comes to your site at:

julesseltzer.com

this will start a different session than coming to the site at:
www.julesseltzer.com


a good strategy, and it looks like this what your doing now, is to redirect all traffic to the secure url:
www.julesseltzer.com

I will keep it all going through the https, which is what you think is best. But why was the problem intermittent do you think? I had a few orders come through just before a customer brought this to my attention. I can't get it to happen now everything is through the ssl, but for my own knowledge - what do you think?

some customers where starting the shopping correctly at:
www.julesseltzer.com


while others where coming to your store at:
julesseltzer.com


the ones using the
www.julesseltzer.com

address would have gone through without a problem.