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I’m writing a full series on setting up your Mac for Magnto ecommerce development, I should probably start with the first step – installing MAMP on a Leopard Mac, even if it’s a quite basic and hopefully self evident.

Maybe one of the less obvious things is that you do not need MAMP pro to get virtual hosting set up in Apache on a Mac, but it will require you to work with Apache config files as described in my post on setting up virtual hosts in apache on MAMP.

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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.

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Just one more quick note on the Magento upgrade to 1.2.0.1. The new full text search functionality uses an index that does not get built when you upgrade. You will need to manually rebuild it in the UI to get your store search working.

To do the rebuild you access the Cache Management page (System > Cache Management). You will see a new button at the bottom labeled ‘Rebuild’ – press it and depending on how many products you have the index will rebuild in a few seconds or minutes.

Once rebuilt it works well, enjoy!

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.

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In my last post I showed how to correct the problem that was causing Magento to generate invalid XML for Google Checkout. In this post I will show how to fix another Magento problem with Free Shipping over $X and Google Checkout.

The issue is that even though free shipping shows correctly on the webstore – when Google Checkout makes the merchant calculation callback free shipping is not returned as an option when it should be.

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