Coupon "not valid for the zip/country being used"

[Jeff2]

For years we've distributed to our entire emailing list coupon codes good for a few days of free shipping with $50 purchase. All recipients are in the USA or territories.

Over the last few months we've heard from several customers who received a warning while attempting to check out saying the coupon offer is "not valid for the zip/country being used." These customers were in several different states. Perhaps 2% of coupon users encountered this problem. The code works fine for the rest.

Neither we nor our host, Lexiconn, is able to replicate that problem even entering the customer's exact order.

Any idea?

[Jim]

If it can't be reproduced it is pretty hard to say what is causing the problem. I haven't seen a report of this issue by Lexiconn, who usually contact ShopSite if they have a problem that they can't solve. Are they still trying to reproduce the issue? We would need access to the store in order to do any debugging so please continue to work with Lexiconn and ask them to escalate the issue to ShopSite.

[Jeff2]

Jim, Lexiconn looked into it a month or two ago. They assumed, as I did at first, that it was probably a fluke....perhaps a typo or the insertion of a space that messed up the customer's zip or coupon code. But our latest monthly emailing, last week, resulted in several complaints from customers about the error message. And I assume we're only hearing from a portion of those affected. Surely some will give up without ordering and not notify us of the problem.

One thing I did a few days ago was to change the standard SS error message from "Coupon not valid for the zip/country being used" to "Coupon Error: Try reentering coupon and if that fails, email or phone for help." Those communications should save most orders and give us a better idea of what's going on.

I''ll contact Lexiconn again. They're always quite helpful. But I wanted our situation to go on record here in case others run info the same same problem.

BTW, We're using SS Pro and the latest updates.

[robm]

We finally got this one figured out (although we had considered it a fluke / user error last month as Jeff stated previously).

If the country field is not used on checkout, and the country text field is blank (Jeff had erased the text previously), if the shopper goes to checkout, and then clicks "return to cart", the error appears. The solution was to give the text field a name, "United States", *and* enable the country field on checkout. This combination together resolved the issue.

Rob