session eCart and login members

Hello,

I created a cart that uses SESSIONS. It works fine.
Now I thought about, only let customers buy if they are registered to the shop.
So I created an register formular, with with email check, and this works (thanks security assist and data asist) well!

Now my question. What happens if the customer closes the browser during registration and confirming the registration link in the email he gets.

I think the session stored cart is gone, right?

How can I temporary store the cart the customer shopped?

So, if the customer closes the browser, it should be restored, and if not, the cart should be created from the session.

Can this be done with cookies? Or should I store the cart in cookies from the beginning?

Cheers
Denis

yes, if they close the browser, it will clear the cart.

you _could_ get around this by storing the cart in a cookie, but i would only go that rout if you dont expect the customers to place large orders.

cookies have a size limitation

if you set the cart to store in a cookie, and the customer adds enough items to the cart, the cookie will reach that size limitation preventing the customer from adding more items.

hmm, what does limitation mean?
is it the number of products that only can be stored in an cookie?

Maybe I should store the cart in an temporary database.

But how sould I do this? which sessions do I have to store? only product ID and quantity, that should work.

but how will I get it back to the customer?

Or, is it to much work, and I should pray that the customer dont close the window?

I, as customer dont close the window, hmmm

any suggestions?
Denis

  hmm, what does limitation mean?  

the limitation is different in each browser. In IE, the limit is 4096 bytes:
306070

  Or, is it to much work, and I should pray that the customer dont close the window?  

I dont think it is all that likely that the customer will close the browser after registering, I think the amount of work it would take to do this, is not worth the likely hood of the browser being closed.