Disappearing products from the basket

Hi,

No, there is no limit on the number of products you can have in a cart.
Now it's possible that if you've configured the shop to be able to add many products into the cart at the same time, it crashes in the middle of the add to cart because of the restrictions of PHP or MySQL (too much queries, or too much memory being used, or too much time of processing). That would explain why only some products are added to the cart.
But reducing the number of carts in hikashop_cart might help yes since MySQL will be able to run the MySQL queries on that table faster. But if the bottleneck is not there, it won't help.
First, you need to figure out where is the bottleneck. If you have a million product entries in the database, that would probably slow down everything as MySQL will have a hard time running the queries on anything related to the products, but it's the same with any other table in the database.
Or if you have complex MySQL queries being run (if you have limits for example).

But I can't say anything precise without more information.
I would need you to provide a link to the shop and precise instructions to reproduce the problem and a backend access to check your shop settings. Then I could better judge what is the source of the problem.

Hi,

I checked your website with the access you provided.
In the HikaShop configuration, you have the "Cart retaining period" setting set to 3 weeks.
So after the last time the cart was modified, it will be deleted after 3 weeks.
That should be plenty so that the issue is not related to your customers' problem.

Also, I see that you have the "Enable multi carts" option turned off. With that option off, it could be that the customer adds many products to his cart, then he gets logged out after 30 minutes of inactivity. Then, he continues to add products to his new cart as a guest, and finds that he is missing the products from before his break. And when he logs in, his guest cart overwrite the cart he had previously linked to his account.

In your message you sent via the contact form, you seem to imply that you're not able to reproduce the problem, and I'm not either.
Apparently, this only happened to a few of your customers from what I can understand.
So my theory above might explain the situation some of your customers had.
I would recommend to increase the user session lifetime. a few hours seems more reasonable.
I would also recommend to use such extension which will warn your users that their session is expiring (or you can also have it auto renew their session for as long as their tab on your website is open in their browser):
extensions.joomla.org/extension/session-keeper/

Hi,

Well, yes and no.
Because in that case, the customer still won't see his previous cart once he logs back in as the cart from his guest session will still be his current cart. Now, he will be able to switch to the old cart from the listing of his carts (if you configured your website so that he can access that listing), but most of them will still probably contact you as they won't look there.
The other thing is that with this option activated once the customer purchase something, his next cart will become his current cart if he has several carts. So if they are getting lost on their carts, it might confuse them, thinking the purchase might not have worked.

The most important thing to avoid the situation of this thread is I think increasing the session lifetime and using an extension like session keeper. Changing the "enable multiple carts" option won't necessarily help your customers.