Kategorie: Behind the scenes

We seem to have issues accepting #Paypal payments since the old API certificate expired on the 1st of August.
We did update the certificate file but the shop software just silently never saved the update.
Sadly we did not get any errors from the shop software and the ToS of all payment providers prohibit us from clicking the button ourself to test things.
(For fraud prevention.)

A customer just informed us and within an hour we found a workaround for this bug.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sorry for everyone who had the checkout page never finish loading.
We had this issue before but couldn’t find out what caused it.

TL:DR

It’s fixed and we have done serveral changes to make sure to find out very quickly,
if is or something similar ever happens again.

Long version

Due to now having a backup every time we do any change in the shop,
we think this happened every time we create a testshop to try out an update before applying it to the live shop.

Not only did we fix the result.
we added some tests to make sure we after every change we are informed if the issue was created
and we have an hourly check that send us an email whenever any critical log messages are created in the current day.

We updates the shop software to offer more option on how to sort the list of products.
So you have an easier time to find what you are looking for.
At the moment only „New Arrivals“ is added but after a while „Best Selling“ and „Most Viewed“ will also be offered.
These take a while to gather enough data.

We noticed that visiting the large categories in the shop with a mobile browser can be overwhelming.
So we added headers to the „species/canines“ category to aid in narrowing down the selection if you choose to. In mobile browsers these will be shown below each other instead of a horizontal row.
We have specifically chosen example products that highlight the large variety of different products that can be found.
We also added a number of additional yes/no product attributes to be used in filtering and advanced search.

Another thing we did was to update the general German translation of the shop as many words updated or added in recent updated where missing a translation yet.
Some German and English wording surrounding the use of filters and sorting have been modified to be easier to understand.

In the HTTP log we noticed a number of „404 not found“ errors and fixed them.

Technical background

Turns out that if you visit a link (you don’t have a session yet) to an english category
and the shop automatically switches you to German (because your web browser says that you prefer German to English),
it will look for the English category name on the German server.

We added a number of redirects to fix this for all cases we could find.
there can still be some left over and we will keep our eyes open.

The shop software is really complex.
We don’t write it outself.
It does contain some bugs and that will always be the case to some extend.

The issue

Given that products with their many properties to support filtering, searching, categories, multiple languages, … are complex, we often copy an existing product to create a new one.
Many years ago we noticed an issue with URL redirects of copied products conflicting with the product that was originally copied. Even as both are supposed to have different URLs.

The cause

That visible issue exists for many people and can have dozens of possible reasons.
So finally, after all these years, we stumbled across the reason it existed for us.
Every product has a url_key. That is unique and gets changed automatically by appending „-1“ when copying a product.
It turns out, that a second, invisible property „url_path“ existed. It was not shown or mentioned anywhere at all.
For a limited time in the past, there was a bug.
When copying a product, this invisible property was not changed.
The resulting duplicates created the error messages.
So finally we knew what to look for and could find all affected products with a complex database query. To not risk breaking anything, we fixed every broken product manually in the database instead of deleting the entire table and have it be reindexed automatically.