Disturbing email from customer

[compwhizmm90]

Recently I received an email from a customer that said I the shopping cart software I was using was not working correctly, but I works great for me. Here is the email:

 

This is more feedback than an enquiry, but I am puzzled by the overall fine

quality of your website in general,

and the discrepancy between that and the extremely poor quality of your

shopping cart software. I sent a response to this effect during the

transaction when prompted for feedback, but after completing the sale, I

came across another disturbing abnormality that you should be aware of.

 

I had previously written in the comments box, but will repeat it, that I had

serious and frustrating problems placing my order to begin with. Two out of

three times, I would add an item to my cart, and the cart contents page came

up and everything was fine. But the other one out of three times, the cart

content screen came up, and the item I had just added wasn't there.

Initially, I just assumed I had missed with the arrow or something, and

re-added the item. But every time I did that, the contents screen indeed

picked it up, but one of the previous items had jumped up to two in quality.

 

Beyond that glitch, after ordering four or five items, I added yet another,

and when I did, the shopping cart contents screen came up, as it always

did... and lo and behold, my shopping cart was empty! i had to go back and

locate all the ingredients of my order and start over.

 

I suspect that glitches sometimes occur, even with the best of software, and

maybe tonight was just one of those nights, but I have never seen the same

thing occur on the shopping cart of any other website.

 

One suggestion - you almost lost my order yet again at the very end, because

i had a typo on the shipping address, and there was never a prompt to edit

or fix it - I had to type in every last thing again. Just another thing I've

never come across. Pretty much always there is a prompt to make corrections.

 

As i mentioned in the 1st paragraph, upon completing my order I was given a

prompt to bring up a printable receipt. Since I had ordered 18 items, many

of which I was unfamiliar with, despite a bachelors degree in plant science

and 20 years of running a landscape design firm, that seemed like a good

idea. But the 'printable receipt' didn't have anything on it except four out

of my eighteen plants, and the cost total. Not exactly worth printing.

 

I have no personal interest in whether you address these problems, but if it

was my website, i'd certainly want someone to let me know i'm losing

business due to frustrating glitches like these. Quite frankly, if I wasn't

in an exceptionally good mood this evening, I would have given up and never

finalized the order I made.

 

 

It works perfectly for me. Does anyone else have these problems? Could anyone possible see if these problems appear for you? my website is www (dot) s u m m e r h i l l s e e d s (dot) c o m ( that is all one word of course, I'm just trying to keep this from coming up in google when I type in my website name)

 

Thanks for any advice/help!!

[vasttech]

Well i found a couple problems. Not necessarily errors. First, when I add something to the cart and hit the continue shopping button i get a product not found error.

 

Second, when I create an account and select the option for different shipping address if I leave things blank it doesn't check the fields. If you are going to make those required fields I would suggest using some sort of error checking. Otherwise, what your customer is saying could be frustrating to someone.

 

Also, since I didn't order anything I can't test the invoice feature for you. It looks like some of the customization you have had done to the site, modified a lot of the core code and probably affected the functionality of the site. You also may want to make sure that you have store sessions set to mysql in your configure.php file and check your session settings in the admin section. Every customer is different and every computer/browser configuration will be different. If you have something like check IP address set to true, people who use AOL will have a multitude of strange problems with your site.

 

The site does look nice though and the problems would have been minor to me, but I can see how someone could get frustrated and leave the site. Anyway, hope that helps.

[radders]

I guess you don't want to add more contributions until you sort out the possible problems you have but I would like to mention that there is a contribution available that allows you to edit the billing and shipping addresses during the checkout process. Not sure of the name of it but it works well.

[spax]

How ironic the people that designed your site (according to the link in the footer), have had their site hacked.

[vasttech]

@Peter - now that is ironic... Probably not a good sign.

 

@compwhizmm90

I would recommend having someone look completely over your site. I tested a little more and still didn't place an order. I noticed that some cart items were dropped along the way. I tried from both a Firefox and IE browser so I don't think it is browser specific. Sorry for the bad news.

[compwhizmm90]

@Peter - now that is ironic... Probably not a good sign.

 

@compwhizmm90

I would recommend having someone look completely over your site. I tested a little more and still didn't place an order. I noticed that some cart items were dropped along the way. I tried from both a Firefox and IE browser so I don't think it is browser specific. Sorry for the bad news.

 

By the way, that was my site that has been hacked. I don't care about it enough to fix it. On a free server, they didn't secure themselves. Anyway, that is a serious problem. I have tried to get it to happen to me, but I can't. Can anyone else get this to happen? Do you know what happened when the items left your cart. I'm trying to get it to redo it to me. I guess I installed something that effected it negatively. If anyone can help me out further, I would greatly appreciate it. I think he is talking about the invoice at paypal, which I can do nothing about. Anyway, Thanks so much for the help you have given!!

[vasttech]

I am confused as to what you are saying regarding the hack. I would first and foremost be worried about that as it could greatly affect the operation of your site as a whole. If your host or web design company has been hacked and the message has been left on the screen like it has as of 5 minutes ago for this long I would be looking to host my site elsewhere and change development companies. If the hackers are getting in that easy they could just as easy point your checkout to theirs to capture credit card info from your customers without you or your customers ever knowing.

 

With that said, without knowing more about your setup and what contributions you have installed it is hard to say what the problems are exactly. It could be a register globals issue, could be a session/cookie issue (most likely), could be a typo in the code that when something is done just a certain way it causes the problem (customers will always find problems you never knew you had ;)...).

 

If you like we can take this offline to discuss further, but without further info like I said it is hard to tell exactly. Feel free to PM us if you would like to discuss privately.

[compwhizmm90]

I am confused as to what you are saying regarding the hack. I would first and foremost be worried about that as it could greatly affect the operation of your site as a whole. If your host or web design company has been hacked and the message has been left on the screen like it has as of 5 minutes ago for this long I would be looking to host my site elsewhere and change development companies. If the hackers are getting in that easy they could just as easy point your checkout to theirs to capture credit card info from your customers without you or your customers ever knowing.

 

With that said, without knowing more about your setup and what contributions you have installed it is hard to say what the problems are exactly. It could be a register globals issue, could be a session/cookie issue (most likely), could be a typo in the code that when something is done just a certain way it causes the problem (customers will always find problems you never knew you had ;)...).

 

If you like we can take this offline to discuss further, but without further info like I said it is hard to tell exactly. Feel free to PM us if you would like to discuss privately.

 

Thanks for your time. I think I'm going to redo the entire site. I really learned how to do oscommerce with it, so all the little changes I made have been causing some problems. I've been wanting to hard code the design not use STS anyway.

 

About the other website. That is on a totally different web host. 5gigs.com actually. Half of their sites were hacked, and I haven't had enough time or want to redo it. It has nothing to do with the oscommerce site.

 

Again, Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Appreciate the help