The Default Theme Checkout Problem

I urge all new Magento developers to keep clear of the default template when building your store for the sole reason of avoiding one of the most frustrating bugs ever to infect the system – the ‘can’t checkout’ problem. I’m most will agree that being able to checkout is a fundamental part of an e-commerce website, removing this ability kinda restricts people’s ability to buy stuff!

So what is the problem? The one I’ve encountered most is the lack of being able to continue with the checkout after entering your billing details. You’ll click the ‘Continue’ button ’til your mouse breaks and nothing will happen. Others have seen the entire basket empty by the time they enter the payment details, and quite often they’d be sent back to the homepage with an empty basket – as if nothing ever happened.

One suggested solution to these problems has been to modify the session settings in the configuration. You just change the Session Validation settings under System > Configuration > Web, to ‘no’ on everything except “Validate HTTP_USER_AGENT.” Then you go to System > Cache Management and refresh the configuration cache to apply the changes. While this has worked for some, for others it hasn’t and it has only deepened their frustration as they become lonelier in their case to get this fixed.

My solution was to not use the default theme. The Modern theme, which is free to download and easy to install has no such bugs reported, and it looks a damn sight better too. I recently had to convert a whole store to the modern theme, which took a few hours, but was completely worth doing to escape the previous hours I spent trying to find another solution. It might not be for everyone, but this is what I’d recommend.