Troubleshooting Checkout Issues

Checkout issues can be caused by a wide variety of problems, which can occur in several different areas of the app (some of which are also on the user-end). It’s often best to familiarize yourself with these issues so you can advise customers who call when checkout problems without needing to wait for Support. That said, if you don’t have the time or can’t figure it out, you are always more than welcome to call Support at (214) 730-0121 or email us at support@ordermygear.com. Because of the great diversity in checkout issues, and given that they’re entirely troubleshooting and consist of virtually no proactive cases, this page will be organized into the different areas of checkout that can trigger such an issue:

• Customer information
• Shipping information
• Billing information
• General problems (not specific to an area of the checkout page)

Before discussing other checkout issues, though, you should familiarize yourself with this error:

The “temporary error” message can be caused by a variety of issues and merits giving the Support Team a call. A few things to keep in mind, though, include:

• The payment may have failed even if the card wasn’t declined. There’s usually a unique “payment declined” message if a card was actually declined.
• If a gift card or coupon was used on the order, and the remaining balance on the order is less than $0.50, payment cannot be processed since it’s below the Stripe minimum for processing card transactions. To address this, you can do the following:
• Raise or lower the price on an item (not advisable, throws off reporting).
• Include a fee on the store that increases the transaction price just enough to make the payment processable (will need to be removed after use).
• Set up a single-use coupon for the customer that covers the remainder of the order (best course of action).

Customer Information

A long text field is not appearing in the customer information section

The long text field is currently visually bugged and does not display a border around it, making it seem as though it has not actually populated on the page. The field is still there, and can still be used to full effect, the lack of border just makes it hard to see. That said, we do recommend using short text instead of long text to avoid this confusion, the only difference between the two being that the long text field allows for line breaks and the short text field does not (this rarely, if ever, comes up).

Shipping Information

The customer can’t click “Save & Continue” after entering their shipping information

If the “Save & Continue” button is not clickable, this means that either the provided shipping information is incomplete, or a shipping method has not been selected. Sometimes customers forget to enter their state/province information. Sometimes this is because they’re tabbing through fields and the platform skips that dropdown box when tabbing, and sometimes it’s the second or third subsequent checkout attempt and the state/province box has cleared itself (it is the only shipping field that does this, so it’s easy for customers to see the rest of their shipping information and think that it’s all still there after having refreshed the page).

The other reason customers may not be able to progress past shipping would be if they did not select a shipping method. Sometimes, after entering their shipping address, customers do not actually click the checkbox to select their preferred shipping method. This is especially true when there’s only one shipping method on the store, in which case the shipping method still needs to be selected, despite no alternative options. Many customers think selecting “Pick Up” or “Ship to Address” is sufficient to make a shipping selection, but that functionality only presents the customer with the options under the specified category and determines whether or not the platform needs to collect an address.

Shipping section not available between customer information and payment information sections

First and foremost, this will often happen when there isn’t actually a shipping method available on the store. This is especially likely if you have added custom address fields to checkout, instead of a shipping method that automatically collects the customer’s address.

Barring that, the issue usually presents as the shipping section disappearing after the shipping information has been entered, rather than it not appearing in the first place. This is most often caused by carrier shipping credentials on the account being incorrect while the only shipping methods available on the store are methods under that carrier.

A customer’s address is returning a validation error

Our platform uses USPS to validate addresses, which is why entering an address that doesn’t match a USPS record will prompt a suggestion for a correction to be implemented at checkout. If USPS will not validate the address, then it cannot be used at checkout - this is not an issue regarding the OMG platform, but a USPS issue that we have no way of resolving. However, validation only occurs at checkout, so the workaround for this issue is to use a dummy address at checkout that will validate, then update the address information in the order by editing the order after the fact.

Another common cause of this issue has to do with Canadian addresses. The first issue here is that Canada is not the default country selection, even for Canadian accounts, so Canadian end-users may not realize that they need to change the country manually. The other common issue is with the format of Canadian postcodes, which are formatted as three characters, followed by a space, followed by another three characters. If an end-user enters the postcode with a hyphen or without a space, this can result in a validation error (e.g., entering V5Y1V4 instead of V5Y 1V4).

Billing Information

A customer’s card is declined

When a card is declined at checkout, it can be for a variety of reasons, most of which can be identified by having the Support team look up transactions associated with the customer’s email address via Stripe.

• Repeated failed attempts (resulting in the payment method being blocked by the bank)
• Incorrect CVC code
• Insufficient funds
• Frozen account
• Locked card

An order cannot be placed using Apple Pay

Apple Pay does not know when our store lacks a shipping method. It assumes all transactions must be accompanied by a shipping method, and therefore a lack of a shipping method on your store will cause an Apple Pay transaction to return an error.

The customer can’t enter a gift card or coupon code at checkout (the code box is grayed out)

This happens when a client has entered payment information prior to entering the coupon code. For a gift card or coupon to be applied to an order, it must be applied to the order prior to any credit card information.

General Problems

Placing an order returns a 501 error

If an attempt to place an order returns a 501 error, it is likely that the default destination address on a pick-up shipping method or a shipment origin address on a carrier shipping method contains an error. It’s recommended to double-check the provided information from the Payment & Info tab to validate the address, then replace the information with any alternative recommendations proposed by USPS to see if this will fix the issue.

A product with a choice field cannot be added to the shopping cart

A required choice field with no selectable options is often used to display a fully functional store that otherwise doesn’t have the ability to process orders, which allows a store to effectively be previewed by end-users. This serves a functional purpose but sometimes you may forget to remove it or possibly set up an actual choice but forget to add the options. Either way, checkout can’t be advanced while the field is still required or while the field has no options. Making the field not required, giving the field selectable choices, or removing the field from the store through the Payment & Info tab are the three different ways to handle this issue.

The second option is more common, which is that a required choice option on a product has been given a character limit. Edit the option to see if there is a character limit (even a value of 0 counts). If there is, delete the character limit and save the option - it should work properly going forward. Since choice fields are not text fields, there is no way to satisfy any kind of character requirement. The character limit field will treat the required option as a text option, no text will have been entered (character lengths in choices don’t count toward a character limit, they count more as objects than anything), and the field will respond as though it was a required text field that had no text entered into it, which is to say, it will not allow the product to be added to the shopping cart.

You can use all of this advice to troubleshoot checkout issues on your store, but of course, don’t hesitate to call Support at (214) 730-0121 or email us at support@ordermygear.com for additional assistance.