wordpress wp-ecommerce shopping cart header/cookie issue
I did start writing this as a comment but it got lengthy, so here we go:
What's probably happening is when the user first hits your website the session gets initialised and the cookie created. However the cookie will not be obtained until the refresh as it gets passed with the headers (might be wrong here but I think that's how cookies work). So basically on the first request its not present.
What your code needs to do is catch when the cookie is not present and pass through whatever data it stores in the cookie to whatever triggers the basket display. Then once the cookie is present it can just read the cookie.
As I mentioned I'm not totally sure on the Cookie headers thing, so if someone could confirm when Cookie information is loaded that would be helpful.