Merchant Alert Spam

[Stephane]

We have a client that is complaining about almost 2000 Merchant Alerts. Today so far there are 60 new Merchant Alerts. They only have a few real orders per day.

The error is always the same:
Error details: USPS Message: Error Information: The Destination ZIP Code you have entered is invalid.

The order is always the same product but there is a spam message which I assume is in the order comments. The spam is some somewhat random sentences and a URL. The other strange thing is that they don't see the order in the order list.

I don't know why this is happening as no one sees these except the merchant.

Why is this happening and how can I stop it?

Thanks.

[Jim]

Merchant Alerts is a new (enhanced) feature in ShopSite 11 sp2. Its purpose is to let the merchant know of issues that may be causing shoppers to abandon their shopping cart. Issues such as not being able to get shipping rates, payment gateway issues, etc will be noted and an Alert will be sent to the merchant but the shopper may not see any report of this in the shopping cart. Previously some of the error were displayed to the shopper (some still are) but they can't do anything about how the merchant has shipping or a payment gateway or product weights configured so there really isn't any sense in sending that type of information to the shopper.

One issue that had not been anticipated is that occasionally a webspider, like a search engine, will add an item to the shopping cart and then proceed to follow all the links on the page. This results in attempts to contact the shipping carrier with a possible invalid zip code and causes the alert to be sent to the merchant. An enhancement request has already been submitted to have this alert not be sent, this will be added to a future version of ShopSite.

In the mean time you can configure the Alerts settings on Commerce Setup > Merchant Alerts > Configure screen. Since this is a Shipping alert you could just disable that type of alert, or you could Set the Email setting to 'No"

[Stephane]

Thanks Jim for the detailed response. What you say makes sense and I look forward to a patch. In the meantime I will work with our client to implement the work around you suggested.