also, I broke a publishing company.

Not that I meant to. I just really wanted this one book, see, at least I was pretty sure I did. Mostly sure, all the way up to putting in my credit card info and then hitting submit, at which point suddenly the online ordering form told me that I had no items in my shopping cart.

Say what? I tried again, and same results. So I switched to Safari and... went through the exact same process. Three times. Well, at least I knew then it wasn't just me, if two completely separate browsers were having the same fit. Baffled (and more than annoyed at this point), I decided to wait a day, try again, and yep, go through the whole six-step dance, get to submit, and nothing in my shopping cart.

So I emailed customer support for the ebook distribution company, explaining what was going on, that it didn't work on Firefox or Safari, that this told me it was the site and not me, and I'm almost positive I mentioned I was on Mac OSX (although I may have figured that was kinda obvious considering if you've got Windoze, you are probably NOT using Safari).

Customer Support writes me back and very pleasantly explains that she forwarded the issue to the tech guys, and here was the reply, and I QUOTE:

I used the client's login to add the two items to the wish list and then add them to the cart to attempt to check out. I used a bogus credit card so of course, I cannot place an order under this user's id. Attached are the screenshots of the process. I could not replicate any problem. My browser is IE7 with the browser set to retrieve new versions of the page automatically.

I am wondering if there is an issue with the caching with the client's browser. It is conceivable that if the user's settings do not check for a new page, that they are seeing a cached or saved copy of that same page from an earlier session. If at all possible, could you determine from the client what browser and version (this is important as IE has upgraded to version 8 recently and this could be a source of problems) and if the client has page renewal turned off. To determine what the page settings are in IE7...

( And herein begins the saga of how I unintentionally broke my-bookstore-and-more. )