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The first 5 Magento Installations I do will be free! Whats the catch? You have to provide me a review of the work I do and my professional service in general that I can put on my blog for others to see. Simple eh?

I’ve decided to start offering Professional Magento Installations as a service, there is high demand for a well installed Magento. All too many people with not quite enough knowledge or skills are having a go at it then ending up with failed installations. I have helped a number of people on the Magento forums who for a small fee could have saved themselves hours of headaches and had the work done quickly by a professional.

My standard price will be $99, I see that Magento themselves charge $149 – so naturally I wanted to make my Magento Installation cheaper without cutting back on quality or timeliness. I will often be able to install same day, and usually install within 2 days.

Of course the price is ZERO right now for a limited time I’ll install your Magento for FREE, so if you are contemplating it, get in touch with me.

Because I haven’t offered any professional service on this blog before I thought I’d offer to do the first 5 Magento Installations free of charge to get some references from happy customers! So if you want your Magento installed for you by an expert, check out my professional services page. Be in quick, I’m sure this won’t last.

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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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.

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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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