Hello everyone,
I’ve been testing the Alishipping add-on extension on an e-commerce website in development and I encountered some issues that I have yet not identified on the forum threads at the moment.
I would like to share my test case scenario here to see if anyone else has experienced the same problem since the issue itself could most likely lead to monetary loss / customer discrepancies if the website in question would have already been live and taking orders in such conditions.
In simple words, the Alishipping add-on extension fails to automatically and properly calculate shipping method fees whenever I add
multiple different store products to the cart.
The only way I can make the cart page calculate the shipping fees for
several different products is to make a minor change of some sort like add one more unit or change the shipping method and then revert that change back to what I originally had / wanted so the
Update cart button can become eligible for me to click. Like that it will finally apply the shipping calculations to absolutely everything in the cart.
The odd thing is that this issue does not occur if I add one unit or multiple units of a single product to the cart. This is the only way the shipping calculations on the cart page will automatically display all relevant shipping methods and prices accurately.
Now the issue is a bit more complex since I encountered 3 different behaviors upon 3 different tests that I ran. The test cases I ran were the following:
- TEST #1 - Adding only one product to the cart (Both one unit and multiple of a same product)
- TEST #2 - Adding two different products to the cart
- TEST #3 - Adding 3 or more different products to the cart
NOTE: For these tests I only used store products that use paid shipping methods as the default shipping method of choice with AliExpress.
There’s really no need to get into much details about the results of the first test because that has already been explained above and is proven to work perfectly fine but I will still share a screenshot to associate to the first test anyway.
The outcomes of the 2nd and 3rd test are completely different though…
On
TEST #2 the shipping calculations did not display any amounts for any of the two different products that were added to the cart. The shipping fees did display on the Cart page “Product” box area next to the descriptions of each product along with the product costs but, down on the
Cart Totals box the shipping fees do not show up at all. Instead, I only got the message
“Enter your address to view shipping options. Calculate shipping”.
When I clicked the
Calculate shipping hyperlink text in that example, I was able to see a populated shipping address which is the WooCommerce store default address that I chose to use as the default on all orders. So, this test only made me conclude that for some unknown reason…adding two different products to the cart caused a conflict where the Alishipping add-on extension simply forgets that there is already a default address to be used to calculate the shipping fees for both products.
On
TEST #3 the cart page reacted differently. I kept the same two products from
TEST #2 in my cart page and simply added a third different product to the cart. After viewing the
Cart Totals box on the bottom, I noticed the
product cost of all 3 products were correctly added up and shipping fees for the two older cart products were now displayed in the
Cart Totals box area and also included in the
Total amount of the cart page. However, the third different product that was last added to the cart was now the only product that did not automatically get its shipping method fees included on the Cart Totals box area along with everything else.
I eventually decided to do one more test by adding a 4th different product to the cart page and still keeping the last 3 products that I had added on
TEST #3 and by then the 4th product was now the only product missing shipping method fees on the calculations box and Total amount.
In summary, adding multiple different products to the cart makes the shipping calculations fail and from what I can tell, the issue is somehow related to the shipping address not being consistently detected when various different products are added to the cart. At one point I started wondering if it was a browser issue so I replicated all of this on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Edge and got the same results in all cases. I tried deleting cookies and cache from all browsers but that made no difference either. I also hit the Update button on the Alishipping interface to update all store products once again in case it may have been something related to that but no luck either.
As a final effort on my behalf to try finding an alternative solution, I integrated Maxmind GeoLocation on the store just to see if the Alishipping add-on extension would start recognizing shipping address information in a more stable manner to trigger automatic shipping calculations but that did not work so I went ahead and revoked the Maxmind license key since I was only using it for examination purposes.
As an
Alidropship Woo user, I can also confirm that I am using the latest plugin release which was updated this week and on the WooCommerce shipping options I also have the Shipping destination configured with
Force shipping to the customer billing address which is apparently needed according to the knowledge base article published in the Alidropship Knowledge Base:
https://help.alidropship.com/en/articles/3000670-alishipping
If nobody is familiar with these problems, I guess it would be a good idea to test this out yourselves and share some feedback confirming if you experienced the same results or not...this just to know if it's a collective issue impacting all users. At this point, I have no solid answers to these inconsistencies so any help from anyone would be gratefully appreciated, cheers!