Product data not updated - spartacus-storefront

We observe some behavior of Spartacus (Version 1.4), which we find irritating.
It could be that Spartacus works fine, but that we lack some understanding of Spartacus.
Let me explain some issues which we observe.
Issue 1: * I go to the product listing page, select a product, which is the LAST ONE in stock and buy it.
If i go back to product detail page, i can still buy the product. The product information wasn't updated/reloaded.
If Spartacus loads a product, it remain in cache for a very long time.
But in the mean time, the stock information or the price might have been changed.
Issue 2: We have separate prices for B2C and B2B Customers. I log on into Spartacus as a (B2C)Customer and load product detail page and let me show product details.
I log off and log in as a B2B Customer, load the product detail page and still see the price as shown previously to the B2C Customer.
The product data and product price wasn't updated.
The prices on product listing page are also not the ones i would expect.
If a take a different browser and log in there as B2B Customer then the correct prices will be shown - at least on product detail page.
Do i have to instruct Spartacus to clear the cache (caching strategy/is there any?) or is there a way to enforce to reload the product data any time i visit the product detail page?
Thank you in advance.

We don't have mechanism that would do that automatically after each action that could affect the product page (checkout, login, etc.)
However there is one thing that might come handy: https://sap.github.io/spartacus-docs/loading-scopes/#defining-maxage-for-the-scope
You could set loading scopes to low values which could practically disable caching.

Related

Shopify - Validate cart items at checkout?

A product in my store (e.g. a fine art print) has a base price of £20 and it has multiple customizable options (size / framing) that are added as additional items to the cart (e.g. Small [£0] / Medium [+£10] / Large [+£20] or Unframed [£0] / Framed [+£10] )
I have to do it this way because some products have more than 3 variant options (Shopify only supports 3)
These additional items that represent the customization options for the base product are added when the customer adds the base product to cart, but the additional products representing options are hidden to the customer in the cart.
At checkout however all is revealed, the base product appears with 2 additional items along with their additional prices. Not ideal but OK!
However, it occurred to me that there's nothing stopping a tech-savvy nerd from grabbing the variant ID of the additional items and sending a POST request to /cart/update.js that removes them from the order during checkout.
The customer just reloads the checkout page and they've just halved the price they have to pay!
I need to prevent this from happening.
I don't suppose there's a way to validate all the items in the cart when the customer requests the checkout page?
If that's not possible, how do other Shopify stores get around this issue?
If you are on the Shopify Plus plan there are two things you can do:
During checkout validation - use Script Editor to check the cart contents and if it's invalid, set the base product quantity and additional products to 0. This will prevent customers from checking out.
Post checkout validation - use Shopify Flow to cancel the order after it's placed and if it's invalid
But that's a lot of development, especially when you are not familiar with it, it will be hard to go through and make it work as expected (covering all edge cases). It's possible to create a such script but analysis of all possible scenarios and writing a code for it will take some time. If I were you I would consider an app that creates bundles as a single item. Adding such a bundle to the cart takes a few seconds to process as the app is making some admin API calls in the background but it solves your problem. I cannot promote any paid solution on StackOverflow but you will easily find something - there are plenty of solutions in the app store.
The decision comes down to your estimation + possible change requests and fixes vs. the cost of the app on a yearly basis

How can I get tax details from my personal webserver and display on the checkout page in shopify?

I want to create a shopify app that can fetch tax and HS code details from my website and display that to checkout page of the user as soon as user adds a product to cart. How can I build this?
You can use an App Proxy at the cart level to show off information. The proxy serves as a secure way of contacting your server and returning results. In checkout itself, you can offer up information too, with checkout scripts post-purchase.
Note that without integrating a tax service into Shopify itself and using that, none of the tax data or numbers you show off will have any use in the actual order calculations, meaning all your work is simple convenience of showing off an estimation to customers. The tax numbers the customers may actually see will be done by Shopify and/or the integrated tax solution your merchant account uses.

Shopify changing product price for variation by app

I am a shopify partner, I am trying to get around the the variant limits of shopify by coding an app and also because my client has a complicated formula for calculating the price. I don't have a problem with the part that adds the information for my variants to the order, however when I want to modify the price based on the user selection, it doesn't seem an easy task to do.
I came across couple of apps which does the same thing by adding a new product or variation which is not optimal for my use case, is there any app that does the job without adding extra information to the database, if so, how?
Qualified Yes
Unfortunately, Shopify doesn't give us a lot of options to edit prices of items dynamically. Here are the two options that I know of that will allow you to adjust the price of a product directly - however, both have limitations.
Using Shopify Script Editor
If you're working with a Shopify Plus merchant, you can use the Shopify Script Editor to dynamically adjust the prices of products, provided that the direction you adjust is down. You cannot increase the price of a product using the script editor - so for your use case, the list price would have to be the most expensive possible price that the item sells for, which you would then discount appropriately using the app.
Using draft orders
Using an app, you can use Shopify's Draft Order API to create an order with custom discounts and/or create completely custom items that are independent of the products set up in the product database.
The basic flow for this is that when the customer clicks 'checkout' you halt the normal navigation, send the cart contents to your app, create a draft order with the appropriate pricing, then supply the front-end code with the draft-order checkout/invoice URL so that you can send the customer there instead of the normal checkout. This has several limitations, however, including that prices of existing products can only be discounted, not increased, and the fact that Shopify will not allow a customer to use discount codes on a draft order invoice - once an order is set up this way, Shopify's assumption is that all prices are final.
Disclaimer: Sorry if someone sensible doesn't like a response with a link :) I'm not related to this app I'm just a user.
On a project with complex pricing, we use the app Wholesale Pricing Discount by Wholesale Helper we liked because is easy to import multiple pricing by-product and relate it by customer.
this app does not multiply the products, they use customer tags. maybe that can give you some guidance.
An important rule on Shopify is you can't increase the price by API on an order, you can just reduce i

When should the Ecommerce tracking take place?

I am implementing Google analytics onto a ecommerce site. We are already tracking events like adding to cart, removing etc using the event tracking. I would like to know what is the ideal time to use the ecommerce tracking apis (addTrans & addItem). Here are my questions:
Should I call these functions for each product being added to cart?
Should I call these functions only when the payment is complete and them while displaying receipt screen?
What is the ideal way of implementation? please provide best practices if possible.
Thanks in advance
I would track few things,
1.How many got into payment form and failed to buy, which can indicate to you that something wrong with payments or page itself. Count number of visitors in checkout - number of orders.
2.How many users got into site and haven't added at least one product, which will indicate that something wrong with advertisement, landing page or website layout in general. Number of unique visitors - those who added at least one item.
Adding statistics for each product added to cart shows you what? If users buy certain product you can get that this product is most wanted but in cart means noting imho. As for your second question, i would implement my solutions written above.
I wonder if your customers should go to an externally hosted page to make a payment. If they do, then GA tracking will not show you the real source of your profitable traffic - it will show you the payment processor page as the source.
It is recommended, or at least suggested, that you place the eCommerce tracking that includes the _trackTrans call on the "Thank You" or "Confirmation" stage of your checkout process.
Also, it's worth noting that if the user refreshes that page that the tracking is on then the code will be fired again and you may see skewed figures in Google Analytics.
I was like you, I also implemented the event tracking first but I wanted to get a chance to implement the ecommerce tracking to get some $ data in there to browse. So, on the developers page. One of the examples is on the reciept page, but on my implementation that wasn't going to work since I am use a payment API. So, On my checkout page I setup the parent transaction. using :
_gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234', // transaction ID - required
'Acme Clothing', // affiliation or store name
'11.99', // total - required
'1.29', // tax
'5', // shipping
'San Jose', // city
'California', // state or province
'USA' // country
]);
Then when I am listing my items in the cart, I use PHP and a foreach to dump each item, sku, price per item and quantity into the parent level transaction like this :
_gaq.push(['_addItem',
'1234', // transaction ID - required
'DD44', // SKU/code - required
'T-Shirt', // product name
'Green Medium', // category or variation
'11.99', // unit price - required
'1' // quantity - required
]);
For the last step in the process, I send transaction data to my merchant processing (paypal) via the SOAP api and get numerous responses back. I do different stuff based on the response I get back. If there is no error from the JSON response I get an COMPLETED response, at that point is when I fire the :
_gaq.push(['_trackTrans']);
I'm not really sure if this is the true way to go about it, but it makes sense to me.

Easiest way to sell stuff and track inventory

on my website I sell unique items. I have programmed it so that on the selling page, users can select any amount of these items, and it calculates the cost. The key is that I only have 1 of each of these items. So I need the shopping cart system to not allow the payment to go through unless it is available.
I've been searching for a good quick/easy/cheap solution and can't find one. I don't expect this site to make a lot of money (the transactions are a few bucks), so I didn't want to need a ssl certificate.
The only way I know of not needing an ssl certificate would be to use paypal or google checkout. However, I do not think there is a way of using these services and making paypal's server run a script to check how many are available on the site. Any solution?
Thanks
I was thinking about it more, and I think the problem is that once the user gets to the paypal payment screen, I have no control. I guess I could do something like they click the buy it now link, a php script updates it to sold, then they go to the paypal screen, but then they might not continue the purchase...
If you use PayPal Website Payments Standard (using a cart rather than 'Buy Now' Buttons) then you could use IPN or PDT (see the paypal docs here) to get PayPal to call back to you with the status of the payment.
The work flow would then be to set status to reserved when the item is added to the cart, and then wait for the IPN/PDT call to come back with the payment status, and mark the item as sold.
You would still need to check and reset to available any item that had been reserved for longer than say 2 Hours. (You could do this before serving a page to a user so that they have the latest availability and you don't need a cron job or long running process)
If you could provide a little more information about how you have implemented ur shopping card, it would have been more easier for other to assist! If you are using any ecommerce solution then it should be there already in the track inventory section. But Provided that you have implemented d shopping cart manually, why don't you add little bit of codes that checks the inventory status first before letting your customers check out?