Why do some shoppers report that they have placed items in their cart, hit the Enter button on the keyboard, and returned to the cart later only to find that it is empty?
Solution ID: S05418
This can happen in IE (and possibly older versions of other browsers) when a shopper places several items in their cart, changes the quantity or a pull-down menu option for one of the products, and then hits the Enter key on their keyboard which then cleared their cart. When the cart is cleared the shoppers are sent back to a store page, possible not knowing the cart was cleared, and only discovering this fact when they go to the checkout link.
This happens because the browser thinks that since the Empty Cart button is the first Submit button encountered on the page, then it must be the default action for the Enter key, even though it is not specified as such. It is also unusual in that it only happens when there are more than one item in the cart, and when some setting in the cart (usually Quantity) has changed.
A workaround is to view the HTML source of the cart screen, copy the HTML for the Recalculate button to one line, and then copy it again and go to Preferences -> Store Text -> Shopping Cart and paste it at the end of the string that is already in the first field (which by default is "Show me my shopping cart every time I order something."). Change the image src to be a small invisible gif, which we already have one that we use for a spacer in the backoffice called screen/dotclear.gif.
So the setting would then look more like this (except all on the same line):
--------------------------------
Show me my shopping cart every time I order something.
--------------------------
This basically makes it so that there is an invisible Recalculate button earlier in the page than the Empty Cart button and the problem described above will no longer occur.