[Plugin: WP e-Commerce] Problems

brian-b
(@brian-b)

14 years, 9 months ago

Problems that MUST be addressed before this plugin can be taken seriously

I originally posted this message on the Instinct forums, but the moderators deleted it. Apparently they don’t take too kindly to constructive criticism.

Here’s the message, in more-or-less its original form:

—–

Dear WP e-Commerce plugin developers,

While I applaud you for the tremendous amount of work you’ve put into this plugin, there are several issues that must be addressed before this plugin can be taken seriously:

1) Google Checkout is broken. Seriously. As evidenced by many posts on your forum, many people (myself included) have tried and failed to get Google Checkout to work, with the only result being the dreaded “Oops! We are unable to process your request” error message. And before you ask, YES, we have set shipping countries on the Google Checkout gateway configuration page. It still doesn’t work. It’s astounding to me that anyone has ever gotten this feature to work.

Until integration with Google Checkout works, and works well, it should be marked as “Experimental” (or removed altogether). It’s disingenuous to advertise features that do not work.

2) PayPal Express is broken. Period. Just like with Google Checkout, integration with PayPal Express doesn’t work. There exists multiple threads in your forum about this topic. Months ago, a post by Dan claimed that the “latest Gold Files resolve this. My humble apologies!!!”

That’s all well and good, but many of us have not (yet) upgraded to the Gold version of the plugin, so PayPal Express remains broken. If this is to be a “Gold only” feature, then please advertise it that way. As of now, it’s supposed to work in the free version of the plugin, but does not. Any chance of releasing that updated code to the free version?

3) Tax settings are broken. I can only speak from the perspective of a US-based store owner, but the tax settings do not work properly at all. If you set a tax percentage for one state, that same percentage is charged to customers from all states (even if the remaining states are set to 0% in the plugin). Let’s say that I need to charge sales tax in California. The way it works now, customers in Kansas, Georgia, and all other states will also be charged that same sales tax! Unacceptable. I had this problem in both 3.6.12 and version 3.7 RC2.

Of course, one could solve this problem by just NOT charging any sales tax, but that’s not a viable solution for most US-based store owners.

4) Customers with WordPress logins can see your store sales data! This is a showstopping bug. If any customers register for accounts on your WordPress site, they can see all your sensitive sales data in the WordPress Dashboard! Wow! There’s a pretty easy fix for this using WordPress user Roles, but I can’t believe this problem hasn’t been fixed globally yet.

Naturally, one solution is to disable user registration within WordPress, but that feature is handy for repeat customers.

I say all of this not to be critical, but because I want the plugin to IMPROVE. There are a number of things that the plugin DOES do well, but some of these bugs are spectacular.

An e-Commerce plugin should be solid. Store owners should not have to lie awake at night, tossing and turning, wondering if something is about to break on their site. Right now, the plugin feels sloppy, and I have a hard time recommending it to anyone with needs beyond the most basic production uses. I’d love to change my mind about that.

Developers, please keep these issues in mind for any upcoming release(s).

—–

It’s too bad that they felt the need to delete my post. I’m authoring an upcoming book from Packt Publishing about this plugin, but I have a hard time documenting broken features. Believe me, I’d love to see this plugin work well!

Viewing 15 replies - 16 through 30 (of 49 total)

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exiled_gundam
(@exiled_gundam)

14 years, 6 months ago

Hmm my checkout page not seem to be working for unregistered user (I got blank page), I already set the “Users must register before checking out” option to No.

My spec:
Wordpress 2.7.1
WP e-Commerce 3.7.2
Payment option: Manual and Paypal Standard

aaroncarambula
(@aaroncarambula)

14 years, 6 months ago

I’m trying to get google checkout to work as well, but the ‘select shipping countries’ fix doesn’t work for me. I still get the “cart with errors” message anyway.

1. Does Google verifying the account with the small deposit cause this error?
2. Does a lack of functioning Google API callback cause this error?
3. Does not having https cause this error?

What are the best ways for me to troubleshoot this? How can I see what’s being passed to google?

Finally, I’m setting up https, as I assume this is necessary for wpecommerce. Is that true?

Thanks!
Aaron.

WordPress 2.8.4
WP e-Commerce 3.7.4
I’m in the US and have all apparent settings in the Products area filled out, including google payment key, shipping etc.

mechx1
(@mechx1)

14 years, 6 months ago

aaroncarambula, WP e-Commerce does not pass any sensitive data to the Google Server when it hands over the transaction, just the item description, quantity and price in most cases. The Google Server establishes a secure connection with your buyer’s browser, and collects the transaction data. So you should not need SSL on your server, unless you need it to collect some other sensitive data from the visitor.
I installed one of these plugins about 2 months ago, and as I remember my client setup the Google sandbox (test) account and the merchant account at the same time, and gave me the production account data instead of the test account. The Merchant ID and key for the Sandbox account are NOT the same as for the Merchant account. I was trying to pass the production ID and key from the test environment and kept getting the familiar “OOPS” from Google. Sorry I don’t have all of the details in my notes, I’m just passing this along in case it helps someone.

aaroncarambula
(@aaroncarambula)

14 years, 6 months ago

mechx1, that could be insanely useful, I will find out from my client the other info and I will post here if there is success.

Thank you,
Aaron.

Chris Billett
(@chris-billett-2)

14 years, 6 months ago

I’m having similar problems, both with the app, and with the arrogance/ignorance/lack of responsibility on behalf of the pepole involved. I won’t say it’s the developers entirely, as they don’t offer support unless paid for, but even that’s questionable as the plugin just doesn’t seem finished, or to work in many circumstances.

There seem to be a lot of unofficial people running around acting like developers or staff members of the development team, who aren’t. It was suggested to me that I hire someone to do some work on a site that needed this plugin, and I went for Shane, who then passed the job onto someone else who, having promised to deliver to a deadline (that I had a client relying on) simply ignored me then emailed me saying “sorry, I didn’t get around to doing this.” – brilliant!

All in all I’d say my experiences with this plugin have been shocking, not entirely due to faults by the developers, but as a result of the entire way the projet has been run.

Chris Billett
(@chris-billett-2)

14 years, 6 months ago

I should note, re-reading that, that I didn’t ‘hire’ Shane so much as approach him to do some work, at which point he said he was too busy and that I should get Austin Passy to do the work. I gave him three days to do the project, and at the end of the three days received this:

“Hey Chris,

Really sorry I didn’t get this completed yesterday. Got swapped on another project I thought I could finish. And I just heading out my door, won’t be on my computer again till Monday.”

Lovely. Getting slightly off topic here, but don’t want my previous comment to be misunderstood.

webalchemist
(@webalchemist)

14 years, 6 months ago

Hello to all…

Sorry to hear that you are experiencing the wp e-commerce blues. This module seems kind of scandalous to me because it talks hard about all this fabulous functionality and has a flashy web site, but if you do the research and get in to using it, most likely you will run into about 15 dead ends, read many cries for help from others that go unanswered from instinct.

It seems to me that their software is complicated enough to look like it is really good to get you into taking the time to install it all, but then when it comes to the rubber meeting the road and everything working, they just want to you to buy the gold cart.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about giving credit where credit is due and paying for work. What I don’t like is someone representing that there is this free, yet, what is free is a pile of craziness that can barely get off the ground without hours of hacking, hunting and pulling out hair.

I emailed instinct asking for support and they said:
“the free version is supposed to be a starting point for developers.”

So while this module might be great, you should look at it with the intention of purchasing the gold cart because the free version is guaranteed to burn up your budgeted hours faster than you can say: configure my store to work with paypal.

baahaahaahaaaaaaa. What a sick joke. wp e commerce for “free” … right.

psperkins
(@psperkins)

14 years, 6 months ago

Save both your time and ibuprofen trying to get the “free” version of this plugin working and just use another plugin. (eShop seems to be pretty painless for me.)

I agree that the free version from Instinct is buggy at best, and even someone who is fairly adept with PHP (like myself) can and will find themselves pulling their hair out just trying to get the plugin to send shipping to PayPal or calculate proper tax settings.

I agree with webalchemist above ^ that this plugin is totally meant to sell you the GoldCart feature. The free version is a royal pain…I abandoned it after a week of constant problems, and set up another shop from scratch (still less work).

Bummer. I really wanted this plugin to be as good as it says it is.

webalchemist
(@webalchemist)

14 years, 6 months ago

well, I did it. I crumbled to the pressure of broken code and bought the gold cart version. Although now I think that the fixes I have found may have even been helpful in the free version…

If you have not already seen this post, you should check it out. It is a bit outdated but basically advises turning off the address over ride in the paypal_multiple.php file.

http://graphicalguru.com/2008/02/04/using-wp-shopping-cart-on-semiologic-site/

CHARGE!!!!

I’m still trying to get this up and running. My preference would be to have paypal handle all tax instead of setting it up in wp-ecommerce. I’ll keep you posted.

matstillo
(@matstillo)

14 years, 6 months ago

Thank you webalchemist for sounding off exactly how I feel! I’m in the same boat of buying Gold Cart but still wasting HOURS trying to just get standard functions to work. With WP 2.8.4 & wp ecommerce 3.7.4, I cannot get any themes to work, my admin in dashboard is shot to pieces & my whole site is running at a total crawl.

By downgrading to 3.7.1, I can run themes, but then my dashboard admin completely falls apart. The css div nesting in 3.7.1 is making me want to throw up. Oh yeah, and my site is still running so slow its a joke.

This has so much potential, I want to use it, but just keep hitting total dead ends.

Samuel B
(@samboll)

14 years, 6 months ago

I have used this plugin many times for clients – error free – and they love it
try the plugin forums
http://www.instinct.co.nz/forums/

webalchemist
your last post was deleted for language – please refrain from dropping F bombs

mojopowder
(@mojopowder)

14 years, 6 months ago

samboll, I’ve been going through the posts like most everyone here who comments on the inability to get the wp-ecommerce plugin to work as advertised. You consistently say it works error free, yet you haven’t offered a solution to any of the problems facing us in trying to get Google checkout to work. I also get the oops. I went to the forums, as linked by you, and as mentioned by others, questions go unanswered or are incomplete. I tested the account by creating a buy me button and an html cart and both worked great. Checked all the settings I could think of, followed this solution, then that one, and what I still get is “oops”. Can you please give us some sort of rundown on exactly what we need to do to install and get Google checkout to work?

swordstone
(@swordstone)

14 years, 6 months ago

For google checkout not working:

in wp-content/plugins/wp-e-commerce/merchants/GoogleCheckout-XML.php

Change line 160

From: $state_name = $wpdb->get_row($sql, ARRAY_A);
To: $state_name = $wpdb->get_row($sql, ARRAY_B);

One problem was that Ecommerce checkout was sending the states as names and not the 2 digit state code, and for some reason one of the states was not being recognized by Google. Since google cant tell us which state thye think was misspelled, lets just send the 2 digit state code.
BING – it works now.

mikejkim
(@mikejkim)

14 years, 5 months ago

techdog’s tip about setting the shipping countries in Settings -> Payment Options got rid of my dreaded Ooops Error!

Thanks, techdog!

missmoxie
(@missmoxie)

14 years, 5 months ago

swordstone, I did as you suggested, but for some reason, it didn’t fix the problem. I’m still getting the “Oops!” message. I copied exactly what you had here, so I wonder if I’m missing something.

Does anyone else have any tips for fixing the Google Checkout?