Testing with a temporary URL name

[FredW]

This post may be viewed as complicated and lengthy, if it makes one’s eyes glass over, I apologize in advance. I'm new to this forum and am trainable.

We are prototyping using ShopSite for an upgrade of our existing ecommerce website and are encountering problems that I am finding extremely frustrating to get a handle on.

Currently we are on a shared hosting environment and the shopping cart is a ‘roll-you-own’ one developed ten years ago by our webmaster. Today we accept credit cards via an SSL interface with a merchant account for real time credit card processing and via PayPal.

We purchased a new VPS server and ShopSite Pro, which was installed by our hosting company. The hosting company that installed shopsite (V10 SP2) configured it with our current URL name; call it ‘real-store.com’. However, since we needed to set up , configure, migrate our products, and test it, they set up the VPS server to use a temporary name – call it, temp-store.com (or to use the hardcode VPS IP address, pretend it is: 192.168.0.99). In order to get around the issue with testing ShopSite using the real-store.com URL, we were told to change the hosts file on our PC’s such that when one keyed in ‘real-store.com’, the PC browser would use the hosts file and direct the request to the IP address 192.168.0.99. This works, in most cases (I won’t go into those cases where that does not work).

To date, I have been able to do a lot of work on ShopSite, prototyping both the “order Anywhere button and building the store using ShopSite pages. Where I have serious issues are with the checkout testing.

Since our merchant account is not one supported by ShopSite, we are planning our using Authorize.net to interface for real time credit card processing. Before I did that work, and thinking it would be easy, I tested offline credit card processing first. It was here that I encountered my first issue with using temp-store.com. Because temp-store.com does not have a valid SSL certificate installed, I cannot test it using a Secure Socket layer (https interface). So I put authorize.net work on the backburner and limited my testing to non-secure checkout, which does work. I don’t like how it works, but it does work. I mention this because I think it may be contributing to some of the more serious issues below.

The serious problems show up with PayPal and Google checkout testing.

Using our PayPal Website Standard merchant account, I encountered the following serious problems:
1. Orders paid for with PayPal do not show up in the Backroom orders list. We receive emails and the test customer receives a confirmation email, but the order never shows up in the Backroom.
2. Orders do not show the quantity and which products were purchased. The order email just shows the total and the text in it that can be configured in the PayPal configuration screen.
3. The money is handled correctly in both the merchant and purchasing PayPal accounts and the order shows up in our merchant PayPal account find, but also does not show what was ordered – just the total amount.
4. The ShopSite checkout pages allows the buyer to enter the billing and ship-to address via ShopSite, but the order is processed with the PayPal defined address. This is a semi-serious problem.

Also, as part of checking out ShopSite, I setup payment for GoogleCheckout and encountered the following serious problem:
1. Orders never shop up in the ShopSite Backroom. Again, emails flow and, unlike PayPal, they contain the details of what the customer orders.
2. Billing and Shipping addresses can only be defined in the customer’s Google account. This may is a serious problem since we plan on downloading orders and offering customer registration. This is inconsistent with that.
3. BTW, the only way to see the customer’s ship-to address is for us to login to the Google merchant account to see the order. That is not cool or efficient. How do others deal with using Google checkout?

I will point, unlike PayPal where no error messages show up anywhere, Google does notify me of an issue with the API callback URL. When I specify it to be at https://real-store.com/cgi- (Google can’t find the fine it (of course – it is not on the shared server but the VPS server.) When I point Google to https://temp-store.com/cgi.. the error messages says the SSL certificate is not valid (of course). I don’t know how anybody tests this using a temporary URL name. Any experiences here?

My search for missing PayPal orders show a bug in ShopSite but that was years and versions ago.

How does one migrate from an old site to a new ShopSite without encountering these issues?

This is enough. If you read this far and have any suggestions or feedback, I would appreciate it.

[Jim]

First, if you are in the development stage of the site I would strongly recommend that you use the latest version of ShopSite. If you run into issues with an older version there is little chance that they would be fixed. The current version is 11 sp1 which is 2 major versions newer than what you have installed. And the next version of ShopSite should be available within the next couple of months.

Second. Payment gateways will require the ability to communicate directly with the server where the order is being placed. Since the name / IP you have in your hosts file is only used by your browser, the payment gateways cannot communicate with it since the domain name / IP that is available to them is from the live DNS servers out on the web. So PayPal's IPNs (if you are using the basic PayPal method) and Google's callbacks can not reach your store to let ShopSite know that payment for an order has been completed.

As far as the Billing and Shipping addresses in ShopSite matching PayPal shipping addresses it depends on which of the 4 PayPal payment methods you are using. In some cases PayPal will not allow the billing address of the shopper to be passed back to ShopSite (or any shopping cart). In these cases all that PayPal passes back is the shipping address. This may also be true for Google payments. They don't want to pass out information for people using their payment method. That is part of their draw, that the payment is more secure because the shopper doesn't have to give all their payment information to the merchant.

I'm not sure what you mean by this statement "My search for missing PayPal orders show a bug in ShopSite but that was years and versions ago. " The only issues I am aware of with PayPal orders not being sent back to ShopSite is when the IPN's from PayPal failed. The reasons for failure were for the most part outside of anything that ShopSite had control of. Situations like you are testing in were the biggest cause since PayPal was not be able to contact the server where the order was placed. Other issues such as firewalls, ports being blocked by a host server, and just poor network connections also caused IPN failures. To get around these type of issues that PayPal had they implemented the Express Checkout method which does not rely on the IPN notifications. With Express Checkout there is a constant connection between the store's server and the PayPal server when the order is placed, so the order is finalized in realtime instead of waiting for a notification to be sent after the payment has been completed on the PayPal side.

Domain names are relatively inexpensive and it may pay to get one that you can use for testing. That way you could get a store up and running and test the issues that your are having before you make the actual switch to your live domain. (Note that if you want to switch the test store files over to the live store domain you will need to tweak a few config files with the appropriate urls and paths.) Most hosts have a shared secure certificate that you can use to test SSL connections. Generally if you ask their support staff they can help you with the URL you need to configure in ShopSite.

[FredW]

Jim,

Thanks for the informative and speedy reply. Your information does help. I have considered purchasing another URL just for testing and will pursue that approach.

Regarding the ShopSite version, I will try to communicate with our host server provider. They are not an easy company to do business with. It takes a act of congress and tons of patience to get through the first level support to somebody who know anything.

Thanks again.

[FredW]

Jim,

You wrote:

(Note that if you want to switch the test store files over to the live store domain you will need to tweak a few config files with the appropriate urls and paths.)

Is his something I can do or does the host server company have to do? We are running on a VPS server and I do have root access. If it is something I can do, can you point me to where these config files are documented?

Thanks in advance.