posted on December 23, 2009 11:37:37 AM new
Today one of my customers tried to purchase an item '1992 topps micro sets' and had a problem during checkout. Here is what he said:
"Charlie,
I get an error message when I try to pay:
Error
We are sorry, there are not enough items in stock to fill the quantity requested. "
I have the item in stock with a quantity of 1. I asked the customer if he tried to buy more than 1 and he said NO...
If other Vendio stores are not having these problems then there must be something wrong in my setup. Are there variations due to the template that I am using that could be contributing to the problems. If so I will change the template. I can't keep having checkout problems with customers. Is there anything I can try?
On the same topic... what tools do you have to initiate traces? You must have some logs that are kept... If not, you need to think about creating these right away.... There are so many variations of software and versions of browsers without these tools there is no way to know what is going on. Depending on the customers to tell us what they did and what software they are using is not the correct way to debug this. I am pretty sure that if you try to recreate the problem that your transaction will probably go thru and not have the problems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. It means that your testing environment is lacking.
posted on December 23, 2009 01:32:13 PM new
Hello,
I would be happy to help you troubleshoot this further. What is the full title of the item in question? (or the SKU, anything you have that can be used to correctly identify this specific item.)
Unfortunately I was unable to locate an item on your Items page or your storefront with this exact title.
posted on December 23, 2009 03:28:02 PM new
Hello,
I checked this item, but I was unable to duplicate the problem when only adding it to the shopping cart once. However, I was able to duplicate the problem by clicking the "Buy Now" button for the item twice. What likely happened is that the buyer added the item to the cart, and then either continued to browse the site or left the site altogether at that time. Then, if the buyer went back to your Store and tried to add the item, the system would try to add a second copy of it to the shopping cart (resulting in the error that the buyer reported). Before your buyer tries to purchase the item again, please be sure that he/she deletes all items from the shopping cart first (otherwise the buyer will likely continue to run into the error message). Please let us know the results.
posted on December 27, 2009 08:04:12 PM new
The customer is still having problems.
Again I ask you..."On the same topic... what tools do you have to initiate traces? You must have some logs that are kept... If not, you need to think about creating these right away.... There are so many variations of software and versions of browsers without these tools there is no way to know what is going on. Depending on the customers to tell us what they did and what software they are using is not the correct way to debug this. I am pretty sure that if you try to recreate the problem that your transaction will probably go thru and not have the problems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. It means that your testing environment is lacking."
I have asked the customer to tell me the exact versions of the operating system and browser he is using.
posted on December 28, 2009 08:33:33 AM new
Hello,
Better than knowing the operating system/etc of this particular person - just knowing what they mean when they say they are 'having trouble' would be useful.
Or did they say the same thing again as before, the message as follows? :
"We are sorry, there are not enough items in stock to fill the quantity requested. "
posted on December 28, 2009 12:01:19 PM new
Well if you had some tools to help trace what is happening it would help. Can you turn on logging?
Here is all that the customer said after the second failed attempt:
"Charlie,
I tried to pay for the cards again. I got the same error message as before expect this time I was able to fill out shipping info.
After that everything went down the toilet. I will try again tomorrow."
He did respond to my question on the operating system and he is not using anything unusual:
"Charlie,
I am using Windows XP and IE 8.
If you need anything else let me know."
This customer has had repeated problems paying me thru vendio to paypal. If I send him a paypal payment request he can make the payment.
A major part of my concern is that if the customer doesn't tell me that there is a problem, I have no way of knowing that I have lost a sale. What can be done about this? By not responding to my questions it seems that there is a big hole in the checkout process. Please confirm you have no way of logging and tracing problems, or if you do have a way then tell me.
[ edited by ezcards on Dec 28, 2009 12:02 PM ]
posted on December 28, 2009 02:05:44 PM new
Hello,
Is it the same buyer that your having trouble with over and over, or have you had anyone else report a problem with the checkout flow in your storefront? It would make more sense if this was just the same person over and over given the relatively few reports of trouble with the checkout system on the whole (almost zero if we don't count the reports you have so far) than if it were a problem on the whole.
To confirm this report though, they are getting the error message saying that there isn't enough items in stock to fill the quantity requested - is coming up after adding the item to the shopping cart and then entering in all of their shipping information?
The steps one would usually take would be:
1. Click to add to cart
2. Click to 'checkout'
3. Enter Shipping address and click 'continue'
4. Click the 'Pay Now' button to pay for the item.
Knowing which step the buyer is at when they get an error message would be useful. The message you were reporting originally about the item not being in stock - this would make sense if you tried to add the item to your cart twice, but you should get this before you get to the point where you would be adding your shipping address and simply clicking continue.
As this time we are not prepared to lay out in detail all available methods we have for tracking issues in the checkout flow, but rest assured we will work with the engineers on helping you find a resolution to this issue. Im sorry that simply reporting that an issue is happening in general isn't good enough, as unfortunately when we have no other reports to go off of we need as many details as we can get to track down any possible issues (assuming the issue exists and can be corrected in the Vendio side and isn't a end-user browser type problem.)
posted on December 28, 2009 03:30:45 PM new
Chris,
I have two customers with problems reported.
One of my repeat customers can replicate the problem. Hence I keep asking about traces etc. The easiest way to debug is to initiate a trace and have him go thru the process. Then it should be easy to see where it fails.
The other customer is new and I have had him make payment another way.
...............
So if a customer goes to checkout and it fails then the vendio system has no way of notifying me that a failure has happened. You have no way of tracing it. Bottom line is this in not good enough for me. I need to look towards other alternatives and I will. I have tried to keep my transactions on vendio to a minimum because of these potential problems. 2 out of 3 customers of mine that I know of have failed during checkout in the last month. I am sure that there are others that I don't even know about.
Please don't take this personally as you and Nathan have provided quick and accurate responses and I appreciate that. The system just has some limitations that I can't live with. I work to hard to generate sales and customers and I can't afford to have any failures during checkout. Not even one. I am sure that you can understand how frustrating that can be.
posted on December 28, 2009 05:07:56 PM new
Hello,
Of the two customers that have reported problems thus far, is the one that had tried and is able to replicate the problem the one saying that it says the item is out of stock? (we really would need to know the answers to the above questions to go further with that one though.)
Also to clarify a statement above - Vendio DOES have means of tracking down the causes of reported errors. Sorry for any confusion on my replies that gave the impression we would be unable to track down errors in our own system.
If we just have a few basic details about what is happening we can troubleshoot it on the different setups/etc. There isn't however a system in place that monitors buyers activity on the stores due to privacy agreements, but we can test the flows on our own enviroments to be sure everything works as it should on all possible supported setups.
It's unfortunate that you have already ran into two people that had some kind of issue on your store - I promise that it's extremely uncommon and honestly doubt you'd ever be able to replicate their reported issue as it's more than likely end-user browser issues. With that said we want to try and gather as many details as possible about the reported error so if there IS something we can do to help avoid this issue in the future however unlikely - we can do so.
Regards,
Chris
[ edited by ChristopherCS on Dec 28, 2009 05:12 PM ]
posted on December 29, 2009 10:32:35 PM new
Hi Chris,
"Of the two customers that have reported problems thus far, is the one that had tried and is able to replicate the problem the one saying that it says the item is out of stock? (we really would need to know the answers to the above questions to go further with that one though.) "
Yes, the customer that has had repeated problems and can replicate the problem is the one who said the item was out of stock. This person is pc literate so he should know how to navigate thru a checkout process. BEFORE reporting the problem here on Vendio, I did ask him if he did anything that would have change the quantity to more than 1. He said no. My guess is that he may have wanted to continue to shop for another item.
My biggest concern is losing sales and frustrating customers. I only reported two customers with problems but I do know of others. The problem is the system is not providing me with information when there are problems. I can't rely on customers to tell me there was a problem.... They just move on and buy the item somewhere else.
