Implementing a persistent cart for guests

Question

I see a lot of posts in regards to the built in persistent cart not working as expected, IE - doesn't work for guests. What I'm trying to do is actually implement it.

It seems fairly easy. Store the quote ID in a cookie and load it and assign it to the session the next time the customer comes back. However I'm not having success. I've worked my way through the code when a guest first adds an item to their cart. My thought was that code would show me how to initialize a cart. Instead of initializing I'd load an existing cart. I've assigned the loaded quote to the checkout session and cart singleton but it still shows me no items when I visit the cart page.

Can someone point me in the right direction? I'll keep digging in the meantime.

Answer 1

Below is the code to load a cart/quote to the session for a guest visitor. I'm getting the quote id from a cookie that I created once the visitor adds an item to their cart.

Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->setQuoteId($quote_id);
$cust = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomer();
$quote->setCustomer($cust);
$quote->setTotalsCollectedFlag(false)->collectTotals();
$quote->save();

It is important to set the customer so when collecting totals any rules will be associated with the "guest" customer and not the original customer that created the cart/quote.

One interesting side note I noticed while working on this. Magento creates a blank quote when a customer logs in if the customer doesn't already have an existing one. These blank quotes are inflating my abandoned cart/quote reporting.