Woo update added “Free Shipping” zone without consent

Resolved rrohde
(@rrohde)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Hi there,

This is more of a complaint rather than seeking support, as I know that Woo will not help here. Maybe some Woo customers ran into a similar issue.

Here it goes:

A recent Woo update (likely 6.8.0 2022-08-09) automatically – without asking, without our consent, and without us noticing – silently added an additional Shipping Zone into our already existing shipping zones for our store.

This unwanted shipping zone was – naturally – Free Shipping, and – once we were made aware by a concerned customer – we saw an update message under Woo > Settings > Shipping. It nonchalantly said, “We added a few shipping zones based on your location, but you can manage them at any time”. WHY WAS THIS ADDED TO AN ALREADY FULLY WORKING STORE THAT USES ITS OWN DEFINED SHIPPING ZONES SINCE 2016?

The automatically added “Free Shipping” zone was found out by over one hundred customers last weekend and they ordered our products and selected this free shipping option during checkout. It didn’t even include any carrier option, yet customers took advantage.

Given that our supplier ships directly from their overseas manufacturing warehouse, free shipping has never been an option for us – yet Woo took it upon themselves to add it to our webshop… WHY?

With all that said, this mistake on Woo’s part costs us over $6,000 in shipping fees we now owe to our supplier, so here’s a real monetary loss due to Woo’s lack of due diligence before rolling out a software update to a live shop.

This is really bad, but I don’t expect Woo to care either way.

Thanks.

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

Luke Cavanagh
(@lukefiretoss)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Looks like a known issue.
https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/34319
PR for the fix.
https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/pull/34351

Thread Starter rrohde
(@rrohde)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Thanks for those links.

Now, where’s the link that helps recover the $6,000 loss we’ve incurred due to Woo’s mistake?

Plugin Support katerinaz – a11n
(@katerinaz)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Hello there @rrohde,

Thank you for your input!

It is very unfortunate that this bug caused issues in your site. We are always trying to avoid bugs but no matter how many tests we run, we cannot predict all the unfortunate possibilities.

So thank you for taking the time to bring this to our attention (and thank you @lukefiretoss for sharing those links to the issue).

While it is not possible to prevent all bugs, we do have some guidelines on how to deal with updates and how to perform some tests before an update is rolled into a live site: https://woocommerce.com/posts/manage-woocommerce-updates-easily/

Disabling automatic updates and testing thoroughly before launching to the live site should help with preventing any mishaps in the future.

Thank you for being part of the community!

nolfnolf
(@nolfnolf)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Hello,

The same thing happened to me (Tho the losses were far less).
However, this should be a lesson for us to always update on staging / dev environments and not on live websites where losses can happen.

Plugin Support katerinaz – a11n
(@katerinaz)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

Hey @nolfnolf,

Thank you for your input!

What you mention is spot on and it is the standard practice we encourage our customers to follow. I am so sorry for the losses that occurred in your shop in the past!

Another tip for the future:
In case reverting to a previous WooCommerce version needs to happen (especially if the issue is with a new version of WooCommerce), this is a helpful guide on how to revert safely: https://woocommerce.com/document/installing-uninstalling-woocommerce/#reverting-to-a-previous-version-of-woocommerce

That being said, we will now mark this ticket as Closed.

Kind regards to all

stylise
(@stylise)

9 months, 2 weeks ago

@katerinaz This assumes that the bug is even detected on a staging site. Should I really be expected to comb through hundreds of elements of my website every time I update plugins, one-by-one?

We managed to catch the issue and proactively charge for shipping, but it was very inconvenient, and we lost some sales because of it.

I’m glad to at least know the culprit. I’d expect something like this out of the poorly managed Shipping & Tax plugin, but not from core WooCommerce.

Plugin Support Rashed Ripon (a11n)
(@rur165)

9 months, 1 week ago

Hello @stylise ,

I completely understand it is not possible to test all elements of WooCommerce after each update. Each release goes through a number of the testing phase and somehow this particular was not caught. I am sure our developers will investigate further and improve the testing process to avoid such cases.

Thanks a lot for your concern and for being a part of the WooCommerce community.