Skip to main content

Checkout Manager Problem and temporary solution

If you are using checkout manager, I'm sure you are aware of today's service interruption at Yahoo! Store. Basically, stores that are using the new Checkout Manager have a major capacity issue where customers either have long waits during checkout, or experience timeouts, error messages or other interruptions. While Yahoo's engineers have been working all day to fix the problem, here is a quick temporary solution you can probably apply to your store, if your store is affected:

  1. Log into your Store Manager
  2. Click on "Checkout Manager"
  3. Click on "Disable Checkout Manager".
  4. Read the warning and disable it anyway.
  5. Back in the "Store Manager", click "Publish" under "Order Settings".
  6. Go to the store editor, hit "Variables", click "Update" and publish the store.

At this point, your store's checkout will be reverted to the "old" checkout, which still works fine. A couple of notes:

  1. If your store normally takes an unusually long time to publish, you may not want to do any of this. I have some clients whose stores take over 8 hours to publish. In that case, chances are there will be a solution by the time the publish completes.
  2. If your store is based on the new Version 3.0 editor, then you cannot disable checkout manager (you will not see a Disable Checkout Manager link inside Checkout Manager.) Unfortunately in this case you will just have to wait until the problem is fixed.
  3. Because Paypal integration is only available in Checkout Manager, switching back to the "old" checkout will also mean that during that time you won't be able to accept Paypal during checkout.
  4. CVV verification is also not supported by the old checkout.
  5. If you are using Monitus.net's Google Analytics Connector, it will also not collect conversion information until the Checkout Manager is fixed and you re-enable it. Monitus's tool only works with Checkout Manager.
  6. Any customizations you may have had in Checkout Manager will be preserved, so once the problem is fixed, you can go back to Checkout Manager and re-enable it.

Istvan Siposs
Y-Times

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catalog Request

You may have noticed that both the Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation pages are now customizable through Checkout Manager. If you have already customized your Checkout Manager pages (or had someone customize them for you), and would like to have the same custom look applied to your Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation forms, all you have to do is this: Go into Checkout Manager, click Page Configuration and then look at how your Shipping, Billing, Review, etc. pages are set up; in particular, check if you have the Top Navigation and Left Navigation enabled. Click over to the Catalog Request tab, and make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation. Don't forget to hit Save or Save & Preview , otherwise your changes will be lost. Click over to the Catalog Request Confirmation tab and there too, make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation (so if those are enabled on your other checkout p

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

Auto-update Copyright Year

This is one of those minor, recurring questions I'm always asked (each year): to update the copyright year in sites. Whether this is the "right thing" to do or not I don't know, but here is how you can make it automatic: First, go to the Variables page (these instructions are for Yahoo! Stores), and do a search for the word "copyright" or the year that's currently displayed next to your copyright message. If you can't find it there, chances are you have a custom template and the copyright message might be coming from some place else. In that case, you'll have to track it down, but because custom templates can be set up in any which way, unfortunately you'll be on your own. Assuming you found it, replace the year with this JavaScript code: <script>document.write(new Date().getFullYear())</script> Hit Update and you should be all set!