Shipping select has stopped working

[mike42]

I don't know if it's something wrong with the shipping gateway or the page itself, but the whole thing has been functioning fine up until now, and the page itself (including the controls on the page) have not changed since June, so I'm inclined to think something has happened to the shipping gateway.

We offer shipping from USPS and FedEx, and, as far as I can tell, are pulling the rates (albeit very slowly today), but when you try to continue after selecting a rate, it just sits for a minute or two and gives a server timeout. The rest of the site functions perfectly, but our customers cannot check out!

If anyone has any ideas or has heard of anything (like USPS or FedEx discontinuing a gateway service), please let me know.

Our copy of AC:
PLATFORM: ASP.NET
VERSION: 7.0
BUILD: 8839

I know it's not the latest, but we made heavy changes to just about all the code we could edit, so upgrading to the latest .dlls made some things not function, so upgrading is not an option right now. We will once I get time to redevelop all the custom code to be compatible with the upgrades, just not today. Maybe if someone knows how we could upgrade only the shipping gateways (if that indeed is the problem), that may fix our issue. Thanks!

[mike42]

Ok, I've just about ruled out the shipping gateway as the issue. Adding that shipping method and recalculating the basket is the only thing happenning between clicking that button and the redirect to the payment page (btw we've altered the one page checkout that AC came with to be separate pages, so the previous statement is accurate), but, for whatever reason, it is taking upwards of 60 seconds to do that (it used to be measured in milliseconds). None of the code has changed, and, to my knowledge, none of the server configurations have changed recently. Any ideas? Anyone?

[Robbie@FireFold]

USPS is the issue I believe. I removed it and now we are okay.

[CGrouse]

How do we get this fixed?

[Robbie@FireFold]

Even with USPS removed we are still experiencing a large slow down.

[mike42]

I'm on USPS's site trying to figure out if anything has changed with their rate calculator API. It doesn't look like the url has changed.

What the USPS site says to use:
http://production.shippingapis.com/Ship ... L=<SomeXml>
What AC is using under Shipping > Integrated Carriers > U.S. Postal Service > Configure:
http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll

So it's the same url with possibly different parameters after it in the one I got from here: http://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Rate-C ... s-v2-1.htm

I just don't know if they are new parameters or ones that AC has always put in. Does anyone know how AC formats the url parameters and xml for this call or how to check, or better yet, how to change it if it does need to be changed?

[mike42]

I found where AC is adding the url parameters in \Admin\Shipping\Providers\USPS\Test.aspx.cs, and it is, in fact, using RateV2 instead of RateV3 as the API. This obviously is just the test call, but that could be part of the issue. I'm tempted to try to find it and change it to RateV3 myself, but that may just make things worse as RateV2 could have a different syntax. Any AC developers want to chime in on this one? Also to everyone else experiencing similar issues, if you could provide any additional info on what you're experiencing, that may help me get a solution sooner. Seriously, there is no such thing as going into too much detail.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I got this from Fred at Able:

I just heard from support. They are aware of it. Apparently the problem is with USPS. Something is going on on their end.

[Robbie@FireFold]

Here is my log:

http://www.firefold.com/errorlog.txt

We are having slow downs all around. Hope that can show the issues we are experiencing.

[mike42]

Thanks for that update, Robbie. I guess we'll just go without USPS rates for now. I've deleted them as an integrated carrier (there doesn't appear to be a way to just disable it), and my issues seem to be resolved.

Robbie, what was causing your slowdown to continue even after removing USPS?

[Robbie@FireFold]

UPS was taking 5-10 seconds to pull up it seemed. We restarted everything to see if there was some slowdown.

Seems faster now.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello All,

From the errors were seeing it certainly appears the USPS is having issues on their end. We have confirmed that there hasn't been any unannounced changes on the USPS side. Given my high level of confidence in our government, I expect a quick resolution to the issue .

[Robbie@FireFold]

Hello All,

From the errors were seeing it certainly appears the USPS is having issues on their end. We have confirmed that there hasn't been any unannounced changes on the USPS side. Given my high level of confidence in our government, I expect a quick resolution to the issue .

Hopefully... No USPS really hurts for us.

[CGrouse]

No Other Ecommerce stores that I can tell are having problems. Are you able to confirm with USPS they are having problems?

Thanks
Chris

[jmestep]

Yep, they're all having problems.
I was going to be sarcastic like Mike, but I restrained myself:

Given my high level of confidence in our government, I expect a quick resolution to the issue .

[bhill]

LOL oh great!

[Brewhaus]

We first noticed the issue on our Brewhaus site, which runs with different software. I tested by removing each carrier one at a time and found that USPS was the issue. It was then that we checked our AC site and ultimately had to take USPS from both sites until it is fixed. At least on the AC site people could get rates for the other carriers, albeit slowly. It was locking the other site half the time.

[Robbie@FireFold]

Confirmed tons of others are having issues:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/ecommerce/3802897.htm

Thankfully we don't 100% work off USPS. Though we are losing money by the minute with them being down.

[chalvorsen]

I talked with someone at our local business post office today in our city, and they did tell me that USPS is aware of the issue, and they are continuing to work on it. I asked about trying to get an ETA, and they couldn't get one, however they said as soon as "Click N Ship" is back up on the USPS site, that means the server is back up and running.

Keep checking http://www.usps.com/common/server_responses/outage.htm The USPS website and click on "Click N Ship" - The link I have placed above has obviously been re-routed to their "outage" page.

I wish I had better news. For our company we use USPS about 97% of the time and we have had to change to a flat rate for now

[Robbie@FireFold]

Looks like their 'outage' page is experiencing an outage also. Just shows:

This service is currently unavailable
This service is temporarily unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

I can't fathom how many issues this is causing. They seriously need to get on the ball and fix this.

[Robbie@FireFold]

Looks like it came up two hours ago. Saw the posts here: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthrea ... post653515

I turned ours on. It works!

[Robbie@FireFold]

Back down again..

Sigh

[calvis]

I feel empathetic for those with the USPS blues.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I feel empathetic for those with the USPS blues.

Thanks for that. Luckly we still have UPS, but our home users don't want to pay $7.00+ on a $2 cable. So we've lost quite a few small sells.

[calvis]

I feel empathetic for those with the USPS blues.

Thanks for that. Luckly we still have UPS, but our home users don't want to pay $7.00+ on a $2 cable. So we've lost quite a few small sells.

Think about the miltary guys and gals: No APO/FPO.