Order being placed with no shipping method selected

(@pnightingale)

I’m having an odd problem where occasionally customers are able to place orders without selecting a shipping method, and therefore not being charged anything for shipping. I have had dozens of orders since starting last month, and this has only happened twice. I have tried recreating the situation from the front end of my store, and I have never been able to figure out what causes this to happen. I have tried placing an identical order from an account I created, with identical shipping address, and always I am charged shipping. I have no idea how to go about solving this, given that I can’t even recreate the problem! But I can’t keep having orders come through and not getting charged shipping.

My website is http://www.wildflowerfeltdesigns.com

The woocommerce plugins I am using are:
– WooCommerce Extended Coupon Features
– WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Gateway
– WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
– WooCommerce Weight Based Shipping

This is such a head scratcher for me. I am hoping someone has experienced this who might be able to shed some light on the issue.

Thanks.


### WordPress Environment ###

Home URL: http://wildflowerfeltdesigns.com
Site URL: http://wildflowerfeltdesigns.com
WC Version: 2.6.4
Log Directory Writable: ✔
WP Version: 4.5.4
WP Multisite: –
WP Memory Limit: 256 MB
WP Debug Mode: –
WP Cron: ✔
Language: en_US

### Server Environment ###

Server Info: Apache
PHP Version: 5.6.24
PHP Post Max Size: 64 MB
PHP Time Limit: 30
PHP Max Input Vars: 1000
cURL Version: 7.19.7
NSS/3.21 Basic ECC

SUHOSIN Installed: –
MySQL Version: ❌ 5.5.51 - We recommend a minimum MySQL version of 5.6. See: WordPress Requirements
Max Upload Size: 64 MB
Default Timezone is UTC: ✔
fsockopen/cURL: ✔
SoapClient: ✔
DOMDocument: ✔
GZip: ✔
Multibyte String: ✔
Remote Post: ✔
Remote Get: ✔

### Database ###

WC Database Version: 2.6.4
: 
woocommerce_sessions: ✔
woocommerce_api_keys: ✔
woocommerce_attribute_taxonomies: ✔
woocommerce_downloadable_product_permissions: ✔
woocommerce_order_items: ✔
woocommerce_order_itemmeta: ✔
woocommerce_tax_rates: ✔
woocommerce_tax_rate_locations: ✔
woocommerce_shipping_zones: ✔
woocommerce_shipping_zone_locations: ✔
woocommerce_shipping_zone_methods: ✔
woocommerce_payment_tokens: ✔
woocommerce_payment_tokenmeta: ✔
MaxMind GeoIP Database: ✔

### Active Plugins (11) ###

Contact Form 7: by Takayuki Miyoshi – 4.5
Cyclone Slider 2: by Nico Amarilla – 2.12.4
Gmail SMTP: by naa986 – 1.0.6
WooCommerce Weight Based Shipping: by dangoodman – 4.1.4
WooCommerce Extended Coupon Features: by Jos Koenis – 2.3.4
WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Gateway: by Automattic – 1.1.2
WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips: by Ewout Fernhout – 1.5.36
WooCommerce: by WooThemes – 2.6.4
WP-Mail-SMTP: by Callum Macdonald – 0.9.5
WP Menu Cart: by Jeremiah Prummer
Ewout Fernhout – 2.5.7

WP Statistics: by Mostafa Soufi & Greg Ross – 10.3

### Settings ###

Force SSL: –
Currency: CAD ($)
Currency Position: left
Thousand Separator: ,
Decimal Separator: .
Number of Decimals: 2

### API ###

API Enabled: ✔

### WC Pages ###

Shop Base: #4 - /index.php/shop/
Cart: #5 - /index.php/cart/
Checkout: #6 - /index.php/checkout/
My Account: #7 - /index.php/my-account/

### Taxonomies ###

Product Types: external (external)
grouped (grouped)
simple (simple)
variable (variable)

### Theme ###

Name: Sara's Fashion
Version: Pro – 0 is available
Author URL: 
Child Theme: ❌ – If you're modifying WooCommerce on a parent theme you didn't build personally
then we recommend using a child theme. See: How to create a child theme

WooCommerce Support: ✔

### Templates ###

Overrides: Your theme has a woocommerce.php file
you will not be able to override the woocommerce/archive-product.php custom template since woocommerce.php has priority over archive-product.php. This is intended to prevent display issues.

Overrides: Saras/woocommerce/emails/customer-completed-order.php

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

con
(@conschneider)

Engineer

9 years, 7 months ago

Hi there,

You are on the right track but.
This will be hard to impossible to diagnose if you cannot find a way to reproduce. Maybe encourage your customers to generate a screencast for you? There are many quick ways to create one.

Other than that, here is my general troubleshooting checklist for tackling issues: I wrote a help article on how to check for conflict and similar common issue scenarios here: http://conschneider.de/how-to-check-and-resolve-conflict-in-wordpress-and-woocommerce/ – it includes a checklist which you might find helpful.

Good luck

svseeker2015
(@svseeker2015)

9 years, 7 months ago

This has been a problem for us, but we thought it was do to paypal express. Apparently not. It has to do with whether or not the person is registered as a “GUEST” or has an account on your site. I think it has something to do with the update that was done to My Accounts but nobody seems to take the time to look at it. Meanwhile, we have lost lots of money on shipping costs, and sales from people who prefer to shop as a “guest”.
Can anybody please help?

Thread Starter pnightingale
(@pnightingale)

9 years, 7 months ago

I can confirm that in both instances that this happened, it was with a ‘guest’ order. Although I have had many other guest orders go through properly, so I didn’t think this was relevant.

I thought it might have had something to do with PayPal as well, if they select paypal checkout instead of my checkout, but in trying to recreate the issue, I was not able to cause the problem that way either.

You can’t really troubleshoot this issue by disabling plugins, because it happens so infrequently that you could disable a plugin for weeks, and still not know if it solved the issue. In the meantime, no one would be able to properly place orders on my website anyway, because I rely on the plugins to make it function properly.

I could try disabling guest checkout and see if I have any more issues with this.

svseeker, it sounds like you have had a lot more cases of this — has it always been a guest order?

svseeker2015
(@svseeker2015)

9 years, 7 months ago

as far as we can tell. We thought it was with paypal express but they won’t even look at it anymore but it all happened about the same time as the paypal express changeover and the wc 4.6.1 upgrade with the my account stuff.

It has something to do with WC determining shipping costs and if it is a registered user, it looks at that zipcode and goes with that — calculates shipping then whips over to paypal express and finalizes.

If you don’t have the zipcode, shipping destination entered and it goes to paypal, no shipping is charged. I think a customer can click on the shipping and set that up prior to going to paypal, but it is not required, and if they just zip to paypal before setting up shipping, we lose as by the time they are returned to our shop, paypal has already charged the customer for the order WITHOUT SHIPPING.

By requiring registering, it assures you get paid for shipping as it is calculated before they go to paypal.

As to who’s problem this is.. paypal expess or woocommerce – I have no idea but we are losing on this deal in total sales as well as shipping. As paypal won’t let you buy from yourself, you can’t create a guest account to test it — fortunately we had a different paypal not associated with the account which is how we determined that guest checkin does NOT work.. only registered users get charged for shipping.

A replay by a developer or somebody from WC would be nice.

Thread Starter pnightingale
(@pnightingale)

9 years, 7 months ago

Aha! I was finally able to recreate the problem!

Thanks for your insight, svseeker.

It seems that the PayPal Express checkout is the problem. Adding items to a cart when not logged in, and then clicking on the “Checkout with PayPal” button rather than the woocommerce checkout button is what allows it to be paid without selecting a shipping method. So disabling Guest Checkout does not solve the problem, but rather disabling PayPal express checkout. This requires a customer to go through the woocommerce checkout before proceeding to paypal payment, which means woocommerce has a chance to calculate shipping before handing it off to paypal.

Honestly, I don’t see the benefit in having PayPal Express checkout installed anyway. Hopefully this solves the problem.

svseeker2015
(@svseeker2015)

9 years, 7 months ago

THe new paypal express was FREE…. I’ll look into disabling that and just going to regular paypal. If you can convince the people at paypal express to understand this, I’d be very grateful.

svseeker2015
(@svseeker2015)

9 years, 7 months ago

Thank you pnightingale… I disabled Paypal Express and have gone to just Paypal and all works fine. Despite Paypal Expresses denials.. they have to be the problem.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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