Cart shows empty when not.

Hi I have been using you cart for a while and find it great. Suddenly I find when a customer clicks on add to cart on a product listing the cart flashed up with the added item and drops back to "cart empty" I though it happened on only one category, but now it is in other one. When I empty the cart I find it coming back when I go to another category.
When I press proceed to check out I am taken to my category page instead.

I have not changed anything but have tried to create a new category and put the products from the problem caegory into it but it does the same thing.

This is the strangest behavour I have ever seen. I am begining to think I may have been hacked.

Hi,
That usually happens when you have the joomla cache activated on your website.
You should make sure that the joomla cache is deactivated on your joomla configuration and that the joomla system cache plugin is disable and flush your joomla cache.

Problem fixed. Joomla plug in was enabled.

Thanks heaps

Hi, are you saying Joomla site cache plugin cannot be on if I am using HikaShop? I am using 1.7.3 and noticed some odd behavior in the component/front end after enabling the cache plugin. Basically it breaks the component form working correctly. Is this correct?

Thanks

Yes, you should not use the cache for ecommerce. Because otherwise, the system will cache the pages but the pages must change to reflect the cart selection. That's why you would see the cart empty even though it's not.

Magento and other shopping cart systems use Caching all the time to speed up the performance of the ecommerce sites.

Is there a reason that hikashop can't work with Caching in the same way other ecommerce systems do?

We are looking for different ways to speed up our sites and are wondering if Caching will ever be an option with hikashop.

HikaShop does not have any control on Joomla's cache. If Joomla caches a page, HikaShop won't be able to tell it to clear the cache because something changed. That's why we recommend to turn that off in Joomla.

Now that doesn't mean that HikaShop doesn't already have some caching in place. For example, the cart object is loaded only once per page even if requested several times for different places in order to speed up the process.
On HikaShop's end, it would be totally possible to add, on top of the optimizations we already have, a cache plugin to store some areas which don't change, but since almost anything in HikaShop can be dynamic, that's not so useful/easy to do.
Also, you can use some other forms of cache to speed up the processing like APC.