Tag: Magento

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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.
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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.

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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.

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Improved Custom Magento Order Number Functionality for SetStartOrderNumber extension – v0.3

Well, I said if I got 100 downloads of my latest Magento extension to set custom starting order numbers I’d make some improvements to it, and sure enough it happened. So here are the improvements. Please note I did not actually do the one improvement I promised I’d do, but I did a bunch of others that I hope make up for my laziness. You can get the updated version on Magento connect or download it directly.

In version 0.3 you can now:

  1. Hopefully avoid the Update before Save fiasco
  2. Disable the padding on the order number, invoice number etc
  3. Disable the prefix so that your numbers are treated in their entirety by the increment logic (and possibly the padding logic)
  4. Set a custom increment amount to trick your nosey competitors into thinking you do 1000 orders a day!

If you happen to be reading this JT, I skipped v0.2, but I’ll circle back around for the cron increment functionality you suggested at 300 downloads, promise!

As always please give this extension a try in a dev environment first, it’s still being actively developed and I consider it beta. Despite that I am using it myself on several production stores.

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Latest version of SMTP Pro Finally Uploaded to Magento Connect

Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.