Loaded Commerce Community

6.3.3 B2B Pro
http://www.absoluteuniform.com/catalog

Every now and then I get this same exact reoccurring issue...
The customers log in, they get one subcategory deep into the catalog, then they try to click on any of the deeper subcategories on our catalog, and it just throws them right back to the catalog index.

This only seems to happen to customers trying to access our catalog from their schools/offices/businesses/etc., so I assume this is some security setting or issue on their end, as in one that is set by the system administrator to keep employees from surfing the web and shopping online while they should be working. But I thought that when those settings were in place their computer would pop up some sort of message or warning that let the customer know they weren't allowed to use this website, right?

So I need some help and suggestions on if there anything I can do about this, whether there are settings on my end that I can change or whether there are some sort of instructions/warnings/notifications I can give to my customers experiencing this problem so they aren't completely in the dark.

Of course I have a FAQ's page, and this is one issue I address there and suggest that the customers should try to access our website from a different computer, like at their home. And anybody I've heard back from that has tried this, has let me know that it works at home. But of course that only helps those who actually go to the FAQ's or call/email directly for support.

You've checked the customer group settings are right and that the customers who experience this are actually logged in? (Do both the Log in and Log Out links remain even when logged in? Bit confusing.)
Main suggestion - upgrade. 6.3 was dropped for many reasons.

Simon

yes, besides, they would encounter the Restricted Area page, not get redirected back to the index. And before you ask, yes the Restricted Area page does work.


yes, that's a temporary solution until I have time to figure out how to put in a working log in box.


Again... when I have the time... I only work part time for this company and web master is just one of several different titles: store clerk, digitizer, graphic designer, etc. Keeping our catalog up to date pretty much takes all my time as it is.

The template currently in use is really for 6.2, not 6.3, and I've noticed some tiny issues with it because of that, so I don't want to carry it over to 6.4 (which is already installed but not live). I'd rather just edit the default template myself for 6.4 to get it somewhat similar to our current look.

A little tricky testing this if the prob only occurs when logged in and accounts are on approval, eh.
Sounds like the customer group side of things isn't working when logged in - do they browse the whole store under https:// when logged in?

For the login links, just replace the code in the header with :

at least then people will be able to tell if they're logged in or not. You'll need the language defines (in caps) too.

Simon

Thanks for that login code!

As to the original issue, just to be clear, it's an isolated type of problem. I have thousands of registered customers and only a handful have this problem, the rest have had no reported problems and sales have gone through regularly since we've been running the site (almost 2 years now). The only commonality between the few customers with this problem is where they're accessing our website from: their places of employment. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but when I tell those same customers to try our website from home, they can do so just fine.



No, the whole store is not https. Login/out, create account, check out, and any other important pages are https but the product catalog is not. Should it be?

Update on the login box - the code you provided didn't work for me, but thanks to that code I then knew what I was looking for when I found this in one of the default template files...



Still, I'd prefer a fully functional login box where they can enter their login name/password etc without navigating away from the page they are on. But this will do much better for now.

I am now absolutely certain this has to do with settings on our customers' computers.

While I am unable to reproduce this issue myself, every single customer we have that has this issue so far has been accessing our website from their office computer. All of those customers, when asked if they had any trouble accessing our website from home, replied that they had no issue from home.

Ok, so just in the general/hypothetical world, whenever a person is on their office computer, and the system admin has set up blocks on the office computers to keep the office employees from wasting on-the-clock company time doing their personal shopping or social networking or whatever web surfing activities, usually when that person tries to go to those sites the web browser will give them some sort of message saying that website is restricted.

This must be what's happening to customers coming to my website, but for whatever reason, their browsers aren't telling them anything about the website being restricted. Now, I don't know how office administrators set up those blocks, whether it's by specific url's, or perhaps by meta tag keywords, or if it's just block on cookies, or something else. But whatever the case, I need some way of either fixing this issue or at least telling people they just need to shop from a non-office computer without them having to call to get that answer directly from my mouth.

I have this addressed on a FAQ's page but that only helps the customers who aren't too lazy to click and read and know what a FAQ's page is (I find that many of my customers are first time online shoppers). Is there anything else I can do? Just put a message on the login page for everybody to see? Any better ideas?