I've gotten a message that my site may be knocked off of Google Merchant Center due to "Inaccurate availability (due to inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website)".
This affects only a small amount of products (only around 0.3% of my 40,000-ish products), so I know it's not an engine issue. After asking Google to recheck the results, they came back with the same error, but with a completely different list of products with no overlap, so I know it's not a problem on the individual product level.
There's no geo-locking on these products, and Google says that the problem exists on US IPs.
Nearly all of the errors look like this:
Value on the landing page - v:out_of_stock
Value in the data feed - v:in_stock
Performing an audit on the products in question shows that none of them have been out of stock for weeks, so the data feed is correct.
None of Google's suggested common issues (geolocking, buy button not working, product can't be shipped to an address, products not available country-wide) seem to apply. The country Google checked this on was a US-based IP.
I'm running out of ideas here, does anyone have any other suggestions?
The answer turned out to be something silly for my site, but I'm posting the answer here just in case this helps someone else.
Google's crawler was setting their country to be Andorra and attempting to check out using the US site. This is obviously not a good representation of the US experience. Google advised us that this was a mistake on their crawler's part, and that we would pass the next audit without any modifications. So if you're here looking for a solution, the absolute best advice I can give you is to find a phone number for Google Merchant Center and give them a call because the error may not be on your end at all.
Update: We passed the audit with no changes made on our part.
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I have an online shop in development, all went well until I decided to do SEO on the shop. After this, if I chose a product variation from front-end it just redirects me to a random product.
This picture describes the first state. The default product load.
This picture describes what is happening after you select a variation. As you can see the product name stays the same, but the link indicates that a totally different product is displayed.
If I have the debug mode enabled when selecting a variation it throws "An error occurred while processing your request" and in the request file I can see that besides some errors (Deprecated: array_key_exists(): Using array_key_exists()) it shows the request for a different product.
I can't understand why this is happening, so I am in dying need of your help.
That's the way Prestashop 1.7 works :
First time a customer lands in a multi-variation page, the default attribute will be loaded,
URL will show only the ID product.
Once you choose an attribute , an AJAX call will refresh the page
with the current attribute and URL will change with id_product-id_product_attribute value.
Not sure what you mean by "random product" as in both of your examples I see an attribute
being selected.
Anyway there are several (paid) modules to change this behaviour in a better SEO perspective,
this is definitely one of the most famous :
https://addons.prestashop.com/en/url-redirects/16633-pretty-urls-seo-friendly-url-remove-ids-numbers.html
EDIT: Just noticed that the ID product is different in the two screenshot, this could be related to some DB issues with attribute too, you should check if you have some not coherent values between id_product and id_product_attribute(s)
I found a fix for this. Apparently or appeared because I was using the duplicate function for uploading products. I don't know why but on some products it makes this behavior.
I've spent over 12 hours to find a explanation for this and I was unable to find one. The PrestaShop forum straight up banned me for posting this topic.
My advice is to NOT USE PRESTASHOP it's and old sistem and full of bugs, the support is expensive and I get the impression that even they don't understand their system.
If you find yourself in this situation, know this. Don't duplicate and upload products using "add new" function.
And I can't state this enough, do yourself a favour and don't use Presta, with all the expenses the time to invest and what the product looks like at the end of the road, is just a waste of time. Even after you finish is guaranteed to break in 1-2 years, any updates will break your store and you will need to invest even more more to fix it. It's an old, slow and buggy CMS. It's days are numbered.
Thanks a lot for help.
Best regards, Daniel.
About a year ago, google maps added the "Located In" feature to places, so if a certain business in located inside another business its listing will show the relation.
This means that if a restaurant for example, is located inside a shopping mall, it will be stated that it is inside.
This means that google keep some kind of relation between places and "sub places" and I was looking for a way to query all places that are inside another place.
For example, If I want to go to a mall, and get all restaurants inside the mall.
I've read the google Places API, and it seems that the "near by" search is based mainly on point(long,lat) and radius, but I could not find a way to query by "located in" businesses.
If anyone is familiar with such a feature, I'd appreciate any help with that.
Unfortunately Places API doesn't support this functionality. I can see that similar issue was created in Google issue tracker 2 years ago:
Bug: Places located inside another (mall, shopping centre) does not show up in results
However it looks like Google rejected it for some reason. I would suggest filing a new issue in Google issue tracker:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/new?component=188872&template=789006
Hopefully Google replies something soon.
I've spent the last two days checking on every portion of Prestashop, trying to figure out how to restore zip-code based shipping functionality, and at the very least, install a flat-rate shipping fee so we don't get gouged by our own website.
I checked various websites, and found very little help; the only responses I see say things about the difficulty.
I tried using modules for shipping and tested out their demos but was just as confused by them, and getting the same errors (in cart, it says any area code is not a region that can be shipped to).
Here's my original thread: https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/460500-shipping-carriers-deleted-shipping-functionality-caput-urgent/
Ok I have looked into this, and I'm not sure if anyone else has experience with it. I'm having termendous difficulties with Yelp and Google's API.
To help explain what I am trying to do here is the concept of the website. We would have to pull restaurants based on user distance, and then randomize them based on quality of restaurant based on feedback from review websites (Yelp, Google, urbanspoon, zagat, opentable, kudzu, yahoo - doesn't have to be from all), and feedback from our users (on results page for the random restaurant users can select good recommendation/bad recommendation). There’s a lot we could calculate for our formula. Things that will dictate your results will be based on if you’re at home or work. If you’re at home you will have more time to drive out to the city to grab some dinner or lunch. If you’re at work we would have to recommend restaurants nearby as lunch is typically 30 minutes to a hour. A 30 minute lunch would require take out most likely or quick service. A hour lunch break you could dine in at a local fine dining restaurant. So in a nutshell, user comes to website. Select if they're at home or work, click submit and we will have a random restaurant selected for them to go. If they don't like it they can click retry and a new restaurant can show.
The issue I am having is using the API to gather all the restaurants in the US. I know it can be done because there are similiar websites/apps that pull restaurants that are closest to you such as Ness, Alfred, and I believe there's two more but I can't remember the names.
Anyone know if this can be accomplish? As I desperately need some help. Thanks in advance!
Yelp is the API that can provide you list of restaurant as per your search, your search can be area specific, lattitude/longitude specific etc. there are number of API through which you can see the reviews of different restaurant and put some logic based on that.
I think the logic of home/work order is something that you have to integrate in your application, yelp API can provide you with the results as per your search.
Go through their documentation for further information.
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/search_api
I'm considering asking for credit card details BEFORE an address for a physical product with average purchase price between $10-$50
What might be the technical (or non technical) issues surrounding doing this?
What comes to mind is :
This seems a little non-standard from the users perspective
We cant do address verification if we find we're having issues with fraud (not an issue so far)
Users may be more likely to complete the sale since they've committed to their most important piece of information first
By asking for zipcode we can populate city/state when we do ask for the address
Are there any dealbreakers i'm missing or things I'm not considering?
I'm trying to make the system as flexible as possible, but would prefer to getit right first time without barking up the wrong tree.
My advice to you is don't do it.
I often cancelled buy attempts and abandoned the sites when I got asked for my credit card number right in the face.
Often, the site is so poorly designed with no answers to obvious questions that you have to go through the complete form hoping to find answer in the process. Do they offer this particular shipment option? How much does this cost? Do they send to a package station or only to my home address? Do they provide an extra line for an address for me to use the "c/o" technique? I often could not find answers to these question anywhere on the site. So I either found them in the form before entering my payment details, in very few cases I did call them, in most others I just chose other places to buy from.
One more use case. In many places I've seen they only show you if they have an item on stock on the very last page of the order form. Not many people would want to "commit" to the payment right away without getting all the required information. You enter your credit card number, then on the second page you see they don't offer the shipment option you need, on the last page it says "the item is currently out of stock - delivery awaited in 3-4 weeks". And the order is already placed. Then it is a commitment from the user but not from the company, many will react emotionally to this approach as to scam and request their money back immediately.
The important thing is to behave friendly to your customers, don't scare them away, don't raise suspicions in them, don't make them regret they committed to their buying. Make them feel relaxed and happy and never with their arms bound.
This may seem non-standard from a consumer perspective, but this is perfectly normal in B2B systems. You can collect personal/company & payment details, then shipping & payment addresses, and then present the user with a final confirmation screen showing tax & delivery charges before processing the order. Only then do you process the credit card payment.
However, the issue that "New in town" mentions is a very valid one, where the customer is left thinking:
Hang on, why are you asking for my credit card details when I haven't seen the final amount yet?
I think this is perhaps down to a site not having a clearly defined order creation process (or at least one that is not clearly communicated to the customer), so that the customer is under the impression that by entering their CC details at that point, the payment will be processed there and then.
It may be best to do things the way other popular online stores do, Principle of Least Astonishment and all that, but if you really want to do it in this order then perhaps a simple progress bar to indicate order creation flow would help allay customer fears. Don't bet on it though, online consumers are rightly paranoid when it comes to their credit card details these days. ;)
As someone who has done quite a bit of online purchases, I can say that I would be extremely worried if a site first asks for my creditcard information before it asks for anything else. It tends to trigger my "Fraud Detector". Am not sure why this is, but I just get worried that the site is going to forget about asking for my address.
As mentioned, in B2B environments, this is a bit more common, though. Then again, in many B2B environments, the visitor first creates a business account before he even starts ordering. Part of setting up this business account is providing the creditcard information. To be honest, many B2B also provide services and digital downloads which don't even need a shipping address.
Many people use the ship to address page to determine if the site will ship to their region/country. They are not likely to bother giving CC info before they even know you'll ship to them.
I live in outside the US and MOST sites fail to recognize that there are customers outside of the US. Often the only way to determine if they will ship to me is to go through the order process to find out they have a finite list of "states" they will ship to and no "country" drop down.