When I began using Magento 9 months ago on our live website, our customer service department occasionally would get emails or phone calls about people having trouble checking out. We spent months trying to determine the cause of this issue without much success.

The problem was as follows: A customer would come to the website, place items in their shopping cart, and then click the “proceed to checkout button” from the shopping cart. Rather than take them to the cart, our Magento website would immediately forward them to the home page and empty all the items from their cart. Because we could not find a common variable that was causing the issue we couldn’t determine how to fix it. The problem didn’t seem confined to a single browser or platform.