It really makes some of our larger customers angry -- especially when they don't notice they are close to the limit, they add a few more items from one page, and BOOM their cart is broken because they are now at 108 items (individual lines in the cart -- I don't mean 108 of one item).

We have 2 solutions in place, but neither works perfectly:

* In the error message that is displayed when you go over the limit, we suggest breaking their order into 2 orders and putting in a comment asking us to combine your orders into one box for shipping. But if/when their cart is already broken, it's a bit too late for that.

* We only display 10 items per page, to reduce the chances that you'll add a whole bunch of products with one "Add" click, pushing it too far over the limit.  But many customers ask us to display more than 10 at a time with out having to make them click "View All" -- because their connection speed can easily handle more than 10, but not necessarily "All".

This is the maximum number of different products your customers will be able to purchase at one time, regardless of the quantity ordered for each product. In order to limit the amount of server resources used for a user session, the number is structurally limited to 100 (i.e. 100 different products added to the shopping cart). Consult the User Guide for more information.

This has been one of our biggest problems -- we've lost some of our best/biggest customers over this!!!!!  We'll try editing those arrays right away.  If this works, it could allow us to stay with Product Cart.

We have instructions built into the error message, telling them how to submit 2 separate (smaller) orders and put a note in the comments section asking us to combine them and ship them together ... but that doesn't console a business customer who has spent a few hours carefully putting together an order, and then it crashes because they just added 20 colors of one bead, pushing it well over the 100-item limit and eating their cart.

Actually, this is the article you need to see for instructions on increasing the size of the cart array:

http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/developers/cartarray?s%5b%5d=pccartarray" rel="nofollow - http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/developers/cartarray?s[]=pccartarray

We have it at 250 items now in our live cart, and when placing a 249-item order, it doesn't cause any visible spike in resources.  The customer does go briefly (about 1 second) to a blank white window after it's done saying it's processing, before it continues to the order confirmation, so we have a small warning next to our "place order" button, about carts with over 100 lines.  

In our (much slower) test cart, that delay was 5+ seconds.

We feel that it is reasonable for wholesalers placing such large orders (and yes, we have a client who does indeed need this capacity) to wait for this. We will mitigate against it with an animated progress bar.

Every other aspect of these large orders worked fine.

Frankly, I can hardly believe it! I really didn't expect to get all the way to 1000 without any timeouts or other issues.