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Magento and Google Checkout: Tax on Shipping incorrect in Merchant Calculated callback

I’ve had a love/hate/hate/hate relationship with Google Checkout and Magento for a long long time. Today marks a new low in our relationship. I’ve wasted so much time on this bug that I have made up a pie graph that illustrates the situation using Google’s charting API:

too much time with fucking Magento bugs

I’ve been on a journey to the bowels of the Magento Tax system and having spent the better part of 6 hours debugging through my issue I can safely say I will not do that again. The issue is that the totals are only collected once per address so depending on how many addresses you have and whether they are shippable or not, you get all sorts of weird results out of the shipping tax calculation. My issue was the calculated VAT amount on merchant calculated shipping in Google Checkout was wrong by a factor of tax % on shipping. So for £10 shipping in the UK, £1.75. Annoyingly it meant that Google would charge less than Magento recorded the order as being worth so now I have all sorts of mismatched order totals to deal with too. The issue could manifest itself as shipping tax being charged in Magento but not in Google Checkout too, if the tax was calculated on paid method, but the customer chooses a free method, for example.

I’ve reported the bug, so I really really hope it gets fixed soon – if someone else goes through what I just did, it would be a travesty.
Continue reading Magento and Google Checkout: Tax on Shipping incorrect in Merchant Calculated callback

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New in Cloud Backup: Platform Independent Magento Backups

This is just a quick note to say there is a new version of the Cloud Backup extension now available on Magento Connect and also for direct download and manual installation – it is version 0.2.2. Our Magento Offsite backup beta progam has been great so far with many participants offering useful feedback and being very willing to help us debug issues.

In the first week we have been able to determine that:

  • Different hosts have very different security settings that make taking full tar archive backups quite tricky.
  • Windows hosting users cannot rely on a command-line tar application. If you are a WAMP or WIMP user please try it out and let me know if it works ok on your host.

As a result I have changed from a system call to tar to using the PHP class Archive_Tar to tar the files in a what will hopefully prove to be a platform independent manner.

I have also added the ability to exclude certain root directories from the backup. This is mainly as a way for users where web server permissions prevent access to certain Apache owned files by the user. For example you could exclude var if all of the session and cache files are Apache owned and unreadable.

The way to exclude files is to list them comma-separated in the exclude text field. Leave it blank to exclude nothing. If you notice backups failing due to files in a certain directory, try excluding it. You could always petition your web host for relaxed permissions in order to include the directory again. (Or move to a better Magento host!).

As always please feel free to let me know if you have any ideas for the development and report any issues – we’re happy to look into them. If you’re not already backing up your Magento store, why not try our cloud backup?

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10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

This post basically regurgitates greatly expands on an email I sent to a good friend of mine this week when he asked me about building an ecommerce webstore, and whether the quote he had of $25,000 was reasonable for an owner-operator hand-painted pottery website. Hint: it’s not.

Naturally enough I didn’t think that was reasonable, and I listed a few simple steps that can be taken to get a free Magento webstore up and running for a small budget – at least an order of magnitude less than the agency quote. The catch is, it takes a bit of elbow grease and tech savvy – it doesn’t require you to actually program computers though.

I’ll state upfront, I’m the kind of person who would rather have a store that only does half of the things you want it to, running; than one that is still in development with load of great features ‘coming soon’. I subscribe to the actually shipping is the best feature philosophy of software development (that’s also my excuse for releasing buggy beta software).

So, with the 10 steps below, you can join the dot.com boom and get selling your products online through Magento. I’ll run through the steps below, and try to keep a running tally of costs as we go. If you spot anything you disagree with, please comment, I’d like this to be as accurate as possible. Preamble over, let’s get down to it.

Continue reading 10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

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Magento Backup extension: Cloud Backup – it’s finally approved!

Just a quick note to let you all know the wait is over (2.5 weeks stuck pending!), our latest extension has been approved and you can try off site, automated backups for free! by downloading it from Magento connect.

There was much merriment in the office as you can imagine:
celebrating the release of our new extension

On a related note; I’ve not been a big advocate for twitter over the years, but twice now it has prevailed over traditional support methods. Firstly with 2 Degrees, and now more recently it out supported forums to finally get some help from Varien, thanks @_snowcore!

I think twitter puts the support on public display. It’d be like if there was a website that showed the average wait time for big Telcos to answer their phones and those much touted call logs that they use to improve their service and training, were openly shared on the internet for everyone to listen to. Or maybe twitter gets results because someone in the marketing department is on a ‘social media’ buzz, who knows – but I can tell you it works.

For others with extensions that are stuck pending on Magento Connect, it looks like it’s a matter that requires human intervention and you best bet is to seek out attention from Varien.

So, if anyone has any questions about using the Magento Backup tool we’ve finally released, they should tweet me, or whatever.

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Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study

Being a computer programmer typically means all of your friends and family immediately assume you a) can fix their wireless router and b) want to. For the same reason we often get asked to help make a website, blog, webstore, killer web 2.0 app or all of the above – which in the most part I can’t help with through lack of spare time. But I did manage to fit a WordPress + WP-E-Commerce project in, and this is a case study of that development project in particular, comparing WP-E-Commerce to Magento.

My girlfriend Cindy asked me to help with her latest venture, Cheap Titles – so naturally I helped whip up a site. Despite spending most of my time developing Magento, I actually thought I’d give the WordPress + WP-E-Commerce combo a try. I’ll summarize my rationale for that in the next section – suffice to say it made some things a lot easier.

So this is a little blog post that summarizes my experiences making the site with WP-E-Commerce, what I noticed different about the platform, as compared to Magento – and in particular how I found the underlying code quality of WP-E-Commerce measured against Magento.

Continue reading Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study