Our new e-commerce site, ImportCostumes.com, has gone live! Its been months since development began and after lots of blood, sweat, and tears (mostly over PayPal account setup and integration; more on that to come later), we’re ready to take orders. We have lots of cool men’s costumes and women’s costumes. We also have a large selection of boy’s and girl’s costumes, and not to mention awesome accessories! Come check it out and buy some stuff!
We found a weird IE6 bug in Fright Catalog and YumDrop today. Turns out, when in the checkout process, IE6 would display a message to the user that they were navigating from a secure page to an insecure page. Firefox, IE7, and Camino wouldn’t display any notification message at all. The IE6 warning was totally bogus, since the resulting page was definitely secure (little gold lock, no messages, etc.). For a while, I thought it was a bug in IE6, but the more I thought about it, that didn’t make much sense.
That’s when I discovered that the notification only came up on a PostBack on a checkout page, not when the page first loaded. So, knowing that we manage our secure pages using what we call a Redirect Manager, I took a look at that. After some digging, I realized I was kind of barking up the wrong tree, and the real issue was the lack of a trailing slash on the URL. This is something that we can either fix in our redirect or in the Secure Redirect module we use. What I found really interesting though, is that this wasn’t an issue in Firefox, Camino, or IE7.
We’re getting close to launching our Import Costumes web site which is integrated with PayPal’s Web Payments Pro. When we set up our PayPal business account 2 months ago, we had some hiccups setting up some of their services on our account, but were told that we were good with the Web Payments Pro part which would be used to take payments over the web. Alas, that wasn’t the case.
When I went to test the live site, I found that our PayPal account was "not configured configured" properly. After 20 minutes on the phone with PayPal customer service, I found out that it wasn’t even set up for Web Payments Pro. What?!?! So now I can’t take payments after being told during setup that we would have no problem doing so.
What has ensued over the last week is complete madness. Ten plus hours on the phone with various customer service reps (sometimes late at night here on the east coast). Misinformation, lack of information, long hold times, and general disinterest in getting my issue resolved. I’ve even been hung up on twice (the last time 10 minutes before I started this post). We’re finally getting close to the end of the whole ordeal, only to find out we can’t have our issue expedited or even talk to someone about making sure they have exactly what they need. Its a complete wait and see while throwing darts at a board with PayPal. Hopefully we can get this resolved soon so we can start taking orders. That being said, I have some suggestions for PayPal:
I honestly think PayPal (with its merger into eBay), has become so huge, they’ve lost sight of the prize. Happy customers. I’m sure there are plenty of them out there, but right now, I’m not one of them.
I generally like to use my MacBook for my computing needs, but I do need to use Windows XP for my job since I predominantly develop .NET applications. A great annoyance is Windows Update. When you update your system it continuously prompts you to reboot, even if you don’t want to. I found this great article via Reddit about disabling Windows Update Reboot notifications. This is something that has driven me nuts for years. Glad I finally found a way to customize how often they pop up or disable them altogether. The only thing that didn’t work for me in the article was executing gpedit.msc. To get around that, I just typed mmc at the run prompt and opened the Snap-In for the Group Policy for the local computer and followed the rest of the instructions.