12.23.08

Google Checkout Carrier-Calculated-Shipping is broken

Posted in rants, bugs/fixes, google, code at 1:57 am by tal

I’ve been integrating my uncle’s corporate cookie gift baskets website with Google Checkout. Google has done a great job making everything easy and straightforward, and the experience has been delightful. Except that it is terribly broken.

Google offers three methods of determining shipping costs: Flat-rate, Carrier-Calculated and Merchant-Calculated.

Carrier-Calculated-Shipping provides the merchant the options of specifying an additonal fixed charge, and a percentage modification, which should be enough so that the vast majority of integrations would not have to resolve to creating their own shipping calculation code.

Google allows for “address restrictions” to be added to the Flat-Rate and the Merchant-Calculated shipping option, so if for example you do not wish to offer a flat-rate option to people outside of a certain set of states or zip-codes you can easily define that.

For some unknown, undocumented, incredibly annoying reason - you cannot specify address restrictions on Carrier-Calculated-Shipping. The result is that if you choose to use Carrier-Calculated-Shipping you must offer it to all buyers regardless of address. Even addresses which are obviously unavailable (such as UPS shipping to APO/FPO addresses) are being offered those services. I don’t think it is too much to ask for those obvious excluded addresses to be pre-configured into the google system, but it is outrageous that you cannot even specify those restrictions yourself!

This is very un-Google-like. I can’t stop thinking that I’m missing something. Google cannot be this stupid…

On the forums they suggest that I collect the zip/state of the user prior to checkout and then decide which shipping options to add to the cart-xml-request. This defeats the purpose of being a single-step, quick, checkout option doesn’t it?

I can’t think of a reason why implementing address restrictions on the Carrier-Calculated-Shipping option would be anything but a straight forward one-liner on google’s side.

In one word: dissapointing!

06.10.08

Blank white page after downloading attachment in GMail is the fault of TabMixPlus

Posted in bugs/fixes, google, firefox, technology at 12:58 pm by tal

Finally a solution to this annoying bug (feature?)!

If you’re using Firefox+TabMixPlus and the new edition of GMail (which is now available also for Google-Apps users) you must have noticed that Gmail stops functioning entirely after downloading an attachment. Hitting back doesn’t resolve this, so you must reload GMail entirely.

To avoid this:
1) In FireFox - click on “Tools”
2) choose “Tab Mix Plus options”
3) “Links” should open by default, select it if not
4) Click on “Edit…” next to “Prevent blank tabs when downloading files”
5) Remove the line “/disp=attd&view=att/” from the list
See complete details here