OFFICIAL FACT: Third Party Integration is a Nightmare
I finally understand why Nick (my partner and my brother) is against integrating third party companies with Shopping Cart Elite. About a week ago we were getting random reports that the shipping calculator was not working in certain scenarios when pinging UPS. When I say certain, I am not talking about estimating one item to one address, I am talking about say 3 items from 3 different address combining to ship to one address, etc.
Between all the UPS restrictions (out of area, oversize, missing dimensions, etc.) their service keeps failing periodically or taking too long when pinging. But wait there is more, sometimes there is a new zip code that UPS doesnt even have in their database!!! (We are writing a script that will look up nearest zip codes if a zip code is not found.)
On top of all of this we have user error (You, the Shopping Cart Elite client), who sometimes puts the wrong supplier address or none at all, missing dimensions, etc.
Obviously all of this will make the UPS fail thus making the checkout fail. Now if its not UPS then something else might. On top of everything if someone decides to checkout with Paypal, that seems to be failing periodically as well because of their slow servers or some other bugs they have, causing another lost sale.
Now this obviously completely pissed us off, there is way too many points of failure at the most critical part of the deal. Our goal here is to maximize our clients profits and while we are doing a great job to get your clients all the way to the checkout, someone else drops the ball, UPS, Paypal, USPS, Fedex, Google Checkout, etc. RIDICULOUS.
Now while we are working out the bugs and work arounds to get this smoothed out as much as we can, here is our solution when all else fails we have already released this new checkout feature which will ignore any errors the shipping might give your client and we will display your client a message saying:
Shipping Calculation is unavailable right now. Please proceed with checkout and we will contact you with the total shipping before shipping anything.
We will then offer them a way to proceed to checkout.
The way it will be processed in the back office is as an authorization only and settled order, but it will be ON HOLD. This means you will have to settle the authorization or enter a tracking number promptly in order to get paid.
Now obviously if you did not bill the shipping fee to your client, you will have to UNPROCESS THE ORDER, calculate shipping, and process the order again. It is your decision if you want to notify the client the new total or if it is reasonable enough you can just ship it right away.
Now yes this is some extra work, but I think you will agree that you would rather do that extra work than lose the sale.
Now here is THE CRITICAL PART!!!!!!
You must use the order assignment screen to invoice orders. Why? because it does a fraud check, it will notify you if there is anything wrong with the order (such as no shipping fee charged), it was designed to be used as a work flow to process your orders SO USE IT!!!!
You will start getting more than usual international orders. MAKE SURE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO BEFORE YOU PROCEED WITH SHIPPING ANYTHING INTERNATIONAL. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE GOTTEN SCREWED OVER AND I STILL HEAR STORIES TODAY OF HOW OUR CLIENTS IGNORED MY TUTORIALS AND GOT SCREWED OVER! WATCH IT -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4cZ6u1JK2Q