Tag archive for ‘Google Checkout’
Magento Events Explained and a few Gotchas avoided!
This post is about the Magento Event system – a full explanation of how it works and a couple of issues I had with it resolved. Hope it is a help for people wrestling with the Magento event dispatch mechanism.
My particular situation was this: when automatically fetching tracking details from our carriers via a Magento cron job, the resulting Google Checkout Magento event did not fire, so the end customer was not receiving the notification properly – even though the ’shipment’ object within Magento was correctly displaying the tracking details.
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Google Checkout disabled – Not available with these items
I was recently asked for help on a Google Checkout problem where the Google Checkout Button on the Magento cart page was disabled with a message saying: “Not available with these items“.
I had a look at the Magento store in question and found a few clues to go on but a
Google search on the subject proved to be of little help unfortunately. The button looks like the one shown in the screenshot below:
The disabled Google Checkout button on the Magento cart/checkout screen. It looks like the normal one only greyed out.
The underlying URL for the button is:
<img src="https://checkout.google.com/buttons/checkout.gif?merchant_id=5677186919&w=180&h=46&style=white&variant=disabled&loc=en_US" alt="Fast checkout through Google" />
The big clue was the parameter on the Google Checkout button image URL on the problem store. It had variant=disabled which is generated server side, and so had to be coming from somewhere within Magento. A big fat grep over the code uncovered a variant=' string fragment in Link.php.
3 Quick Methods To Diagnose Communication Problems between Magento and Google Checkout
There is a lot going on when Magento actually sends a cart to Google Checkout, even more so if you are using Merchant calculated shipping. As a result lots of things can go wrong, with the merchant calculated shipping callback or with the actual server to server posting of the cart contents.
To help you with diagnosing problems I thought I’d shared my top 3 methods for finding out what is going wrong when Magento and Google Checkout are not communicating properly.
1) The Intergration Console
The first and most obvious place to try is the Google Checkout Intergration Console. As you can see in the screenshot below the console is hidden away in the Tools tab of the main seller dashboard. You’ll find it at the bottom of the left menu.
The Intergration Console is tucked away in the tools tab at the bottom of the left menu.
If the Google callbacks have failed or incorrect XML has been sent to Google you will find a report of the errors here. It is a good idea to keep an eye on the timestamps as you do not want to wind up chasing an old problem. It’s also good to periodically check this console while in production, just in case something starts to go wrong. I found when I upgraded to the latest Magento that the HTTPS callback was failing, but I hadn’t found it during development because I do not use SSL in development environments.
Bad Usability Fixed: No End Date For Google Checkout Payout Transaction Report
I have been helping out with some sales reporting lately which has meant I have been using the order and transaction CSV downloads Google Checkout offers.
I found one feature of Google Checkout strangely lacking on the usability front. The payout and transaction download only allows you to specify a single day rather than a date range, so if you wanted a month of data you would have to run the report 30 times and aggregate the data in your own spreadsheet: no thanks Google!
Google Checkout Transaction download only offers a single day.
Magento 1.2.0.1 Fails when using Google Checkout Merchant Calculated Shipping Callbacks: An HTTPS URL is required.
Long time, no post – busy time with Christmas and New years. I went to Mahia Beach on the east coast of New Zealand, amazing place – I was lucky enough to swim with a wild dolphin named Moko, he stole someones boogie board too!
Anyway, to more nerdy subject matter, I recently upgraded our Magento webstore to version 1.2.0.1 – it was relatively painless except for one major hiccup. There seems to be a bug with the configuration scopes in the new version of Magento that means the HTTPS URL is not propagating to the webstore from the default configuration scope.
The problem manifests itself as your Google Checkout merchant calculated shipping callback failing (and subsequently using the default amount). There is a message in the Google checkout integration console:
URL you are using for merchant calculations is not valid or is not https http://www.yourdomain.com/googlecheckout/api/ — the error we got is: An HTTPS URL is required.
