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

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

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i

Smaller is Better

You often hear the phrase "bigger is better". Sometimes it's true but not when it comes to JavaScript or CSS code in your Yahoo! Store pages. If you include JavaScript code or CSS either as linked files (the preferred method) or embedded inside your pages (obviously not preferred), making these files as small as possible should be your goal. Why? This is no rocket science: smaller files mean faster page loads = happy customers. Ok, so what bloats JavaScript code? In general, white space (tabs, carriage returns, non-used spaces), comments, and the actual code, such as variable and function names. You have control over all of these, however, if you don't use white spaces, carriage returns or comments, it will be immensely difficult to understand and modify your code. And not just for others, you too. There are many commercial JavaScript compression tools around, but I've been using this handy and free utility: http://www.andrewkesper.com/jscrush/ This little utilit