Confirmed Bug - Customers Can't Pay partially with Gift Certificate

tartaglia · #1 12-16-2013, 03:15 PM

First, I must say that I am a believer in QT and their XC product. I have been working with them since 2006. I pay for their support subscription service.

The following is posted ONLY to educate my fellow X-Carters about a BUG that has been confirmed by QT but has yet to be fixed and which could be problematic to a company and their reputation without their knowledge. The QT Maintenance Team is working on a resolution but has not released one yet.

For full disclosure I run XC 4.5.4 Gold+ w/ X-Payments.

Summary: If a customer attempts to use a XC Gift Certificate to partially pay for a purchase, they could find themselves in a unrecoverable situation and be unable to complete their order. This is significant because selling Gift Certificates is good business for merchants however if word gets out that they can't be redeemed reliably, sales of GC are likely to drop signifcantly.

Scenario (Repeatable steps):
1. Customer gets to the OPC page, enters their personal details, selects a shipping method and enters and submits their GC code for application against their order total.
2. When the order total is greater than the present value of the GC (this is a preferred scenario for merchants!), XC advises the customer that they must pay the remaining balance using another GC or Payment Method.
3. The customer selects to use the Credit Card payment method, and the XP iframe loads with fields for the credit card data.
4. At this point, should the customer choose to modify either any of their personal details (billing address, etc.) or modify the selected shipping method, they are presented with an non-human-readable error code in the payment iframe and they are unable to continue with their order.

As a merchant you may never know this is happening, unless a customer complains in detail.

In our case we were VERY much looking forward to promoting the sale of GC on our site for this holiday season. But when we learned of this bug we could not in good conscience do so for fear of frustrating our customers. I hope this post helps others.

The bug was confirmed by QT on Oct 18, 2013 on XC versions up through 4.6.1.

cflsystems · #2 12-16-2013, 03:26 PM

Thanks for posting this David. The scary part of your post here is

Quote:

BUG that has been confirmed by QT

then

Quote:

The QT Maintenance Team is working on a resolution but has not released one yet

followed by

Quote:

The bug was confirmed by QT on Oct 18, 2013 ...

It is Dec 16, 2013 now - this is 2 months after the bug was confirmed (so it was discovered even before this date) and for 2 months there is no patch for something critical as this?

Unless the date you provided is incorrect....

tartaglia · #3 12-16-2013, 04:10 PM

The dates are correct. I reported the issue to the support engineer on Oct 9, 2013. He was immediately responsive and tried to fix the problem but was unsucessfull that same day. The support engineer then did the right thing and tested default 4.6.1 code, identified it as a bug and confirmed it back to me. The support engineer did a god job, but it is out of his hands now as it resides with the Maintenance Team.

tartaglia · #4 12-16-2013, 04:12 PM

Sorry meant to say "The support engineer did a good job..", I don't to make hime get a big head

cflsystems · #5 12-16-2013, 04:42 PM

I am just surprised that something critical as this is not fixed for 2 months and is probably X-Payments issue....

An e-commerce store that cannot take payments is as good as brick in water...

tartaglia · #6 12-23-2013, 02:40 PM

Steve, I humbly agree, I hope this helps others. Knowing what doesn't work is as important as knowing what does.

It was really disappointing that my first holiday season using X-Cart (I went live last January) I was sure I could go heavy on the marketing for our electronic gift certificates (something our competitors don't offer), but in the end I could not in good concience.

I guess some would argue that the sale of the GC is the important part cause we get our money up front, but I think if the customer can't redeem it correctly the intangible damage could be far greater.

qualiteam · #7 12-24-2013, 01:36 AM

I believe this issue happens with X-Payments only, so I've moved the thread to the X-Payments section of the forum.

Just wanted to let you know that we aware of the problem and it is in our TO-DO list. Unfortunately, I can't say how soon X-Payments developers can get this fixed.

carpeperdiem · #8 12-28-2013, 06:54 PM

I discovered this last year and simply killed off the GC redemption function. I have been using Altered Cart's Cash Rewards module -- very easy to credit anyone for instant spend @ checkout -- yes, this requires some admin clicks to apply a GC, but because I pay commissions on my GCs to affiliates, GCs are now a "product" for my store, and we do not need to use the xcart GC function.

I hate to say, the X-Cart Gift certificate module was simply never tested in the real world, not designed or engineered well, and should not be used for production.

carpeperdiem · #9 12-28-2013, 06:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by qualiteam

I believe this issue happens with X-Payments only

Unfortunately, no. I just tested on my dev store (4.5.4)

Let's say you have 3 payment methods:

1. x-payments
2. gift certificate
3. paypal standard

Payment method #1 is default.
Customer has option to select payment method... customer selects #2. Applies gift cert... submit.

Error.

X-payments was never involved.

tartaglia · #10 12-29-2013, 08:22 AM

Thanks for the additional testing/confirmation carpeperdiem and cflsystems.

GOOD NEWS.... QT (Roman) has installed a patch for this issue on my store. It involved changes to the include/payment_method.php file (about 15 new lines of code)

After performing a single test (repeating the steps that reliably produced the problem on my site initially) I can say that it appears the problem is fixed.

If some of you with dev sites will get the patch and test it under your own circumstances and versions of XC it will increase my confidence that QT has put this issue to bed.

I knew QT could do it, but thanks to all your input and additional testing data points I think it helped them do it faster. BETTER for EVERYONE!

(P.S. I now have a bunch of test related GCs on my site...and guess what! There is another bug that won't let me select them from the admin side and get rid of them...oh well here comes another support ticket...happy new year everyone)