Woocommerce adds stuff to random carts Woothemes will not fix.

Hi Edward,

I am sorry to hear you’re having all these issues. I have since looked up one of your recent tickets with us and I see you have not replied to it.

Anyhow, I would suggest you open any tickets with us in regards to your issues and we will do our best to help you. However some things are just not in our control. For example your bulk email sending issue as many hosting companies will not let you bulk send emails like in an email blast. You can ask your hosting company if they will allow this or not.

Again, please don’t hesitate to contact us and if it is something we can fix, we will be happy to do it for you.

Hi Roy,

That is part of the problem others may be having a random adding to cart issue and they may not be able to find help or know that they are not alone. So I rather address it here.

Anymore I think woothemes is churning out plugins but not fixing the bugs. For example I have the ship station plugin and not all orders were importing into the Shipstation dashboard. Shipstation could not fix it. I wound up turning ALL caching off in WPengine and suddenly all the orders import. So you guys need to get with WPengine and ask them to not cache shipstaiton API. But chances are I will have to do it and nobody will know what I am talking about or wpengine will blame the theme and in the end it just doesn’t get done.

Email blast? Why cant you write your code to send out 30 emails at a time? I don’t think its an issue with my email provider (gmail using SMTP plugin) as much as its wordpress timing out because sending 45 emails takes about 2 minutes. I think the code needs to be tweaked rather than have people go and seek out rapid mail servers. There is no progress bar, nothing to let you know whats going on. You click update and the page freezes for a few seconds to a few minutes while these emails are sent then suddenly there is a “503” error and I have to refresh the page. (This happens on any operation that takes longer than a minute) Simply put I paid for a plugin and now I am being told I need a new mail server. That is literally not mentioned anywhere in the docs or anything. As I said in the ticket why cant the code be optimized to send out small bursts rather than a page froze while I wait? Did you even do a test on what it takes to send 100 emails, are you 100% sure a rapid mail server will fix it. Sounds to me like http connection is timing out waiting for the page to refresh???

I can forgive most of the stuff the real deal breaker is customers with random stuff in their cart after they paid. This is unacceptable, you push wpengine (and use an affiliate link), to work with your cart and I am not convinced its a wpengine issue alone as it may be an issue with the plugin itself.

BOTTOM LINE

When someone who is low income spends $15 and a $75 item is in your cart and funds are removed. They are not only mad because they feel defrauded but that person has to wait for $75 to be returned to their account after I credit it back to their card. Someone needs to fix this!

And if your reading this(the average joe that is) , woocommerce works fine when your a low traffic 100 hits a day site. But its awful when your got 2000+ hits a day and 100 orders. It will mangle orders daily, if you don’t use the clear carts tool nightly. (Doing that opens a whole new can of worms too sometimes)

I have been dealing with this issue since Woocommerce 2.0! I am asking woocommerce to look at this issue. Put yourself in my shoes.

This just came in today another mystery item added on checkout.

“Dear Sirs:
I wanted to order, 2 five packs of the Kanger Pro Tank eVod Atomizer Heads sold at $5.79 each.
I don’t want the Kanger eVod VV Battery!!

PLEASE Cancel order # 21251 and put back the funds you charged back on my Bank Card PLEASE.”

This guy is nice, but I am sure he will not be coming back. Be warned woocommerce has been doing this for a long time. And I am using the recommended WPengine they promote as recommended hosting.

It will even do this on a bare fresh install with no plugins other than woocommerce. I would post a more hostile customer but I it would get flagged for language.

Also this order didn’t even have the original product he put into his cart. It was like a totally different purchase. WOW!

Hi @lowcostego,
How have your efforts gone to replicate the ‘random stuff in the cart’ issue?

Go to my site. https://bit.ly/1dkIp94

Open both a internet explorer browser and a firefox or chrome browser add an item to cart in one browser. Now quickly start browsing the site in the second browser watch as it magically appears in your empty cart.

Now if you have two PC’s or a virtual machine’s. Add an item to the cart then run to the other PC and start browsing the site and watch at the item magically appears. I just tried using the first method and sure enough Internet Explorer and Chrome had the same items in the cart after 10 seconds of browsing. AND I opened chrome with a new fresh incognito window so I would not be signed in.

I’m a wee bit confused by the criteria you’ve identified.

Does the issue revolve around logged-in users and the ‘magic sharing’ of cart contents across multiple browsers/platforms for cart contents for a given user?

Or are you saying that different users end up ‘magic sharing’ cart contents across multiple browsers/platforms regardless of logged-in status?

Right now I am 100% sure NOT logged in users have this issue and I think it carry’s over until they are logged in. I am only 70% sure it happens to logged in users as well, base on their testimony after I call them back.

I replicate the issue not logged in and if my memory serves me right, I can also do it logged in as well but its harder. (My memory is hazy since its been a while)

The last time I did extensive troubleshooting was before last summer. I setup a uncached VPS on liquidweb and was able to simulate the issue.

As far as how deep this issue runs I am not 100% certain. I do know more traffic = more issues and I have to clear the cart. Woocommerce>System Status>Tools Tab> click all options except for “reset capabilities” this seems helps make the issue less intense as some days I can happen up to 5 times.

Turning off the WPengine cache actually makes it worse, but if I don’t turn off the cache half of my order will not import into ship station.

I would hate to let go of woocommerce, I do like the system. But I cant keep losing customers. Here is another sample of a person who didn’t resort to cursing.

“I place my order for the aerotank base and the mini protank 2 amd the cart automatically added the juice to my order. Thos seems VERY shady on your part…please remove the juice from my order and refund the 8.00 cost bacl to my card. This is the first time using your site and this does not leave me a very happy customer. Please let me know when you have this taken care
of. Order # 21041.

Thanks, (name omitted) ”

I’ve been watching this thread since it was posted. I could not believe what was said, until I saw the site inwhich I clearly see where the issue is.

The issue is with how your site’s caching layor works. I’ve been managing 10+ WooCommerce installations (and a few other ecommerce sites, not related to WordPress). All WP + WC sites work fine in an Nginx + WP Super Cache combo, since the beginning. Never considered Varnish for such sites. However, I see where things went wrong with your site.

In your site, basically all cookies are cached! See the following curl output of your home page as non-logged-in user…

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: WP Engine/5.0
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:11:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=20
Set-Cookie: current_tab=%23related-products
Set-Cookie: wc_session_cookie_3499d985f47610790e8eb8ce4aa543e4=nBU67bSffgEdOuW2nnl2ykXJyH5AdAnY%7C%7C1391601986%7C%7C1391598386%7C%7Caf9bbfd37bf37b39aff8228124a5f722; expires=Wed, 05-Feb-2014 12:06:26 GMT; path=/; httponly
Set-Cookie: woocommerce_items_in_cart=0; expires=Mon, 03-Feb-2014 11:06:26 GMT; path=/
Set-Cookie: woocommerce_cart_hash=0; expires=Mon, 03-Feb-2014 11:06:26 GMT; path=/
X-Pingback: https://www.xxxxxx.com/xmlrpc.php
Link: <https://wp.me/xxxxxx>; rel=shortlink
X-Cacheable: SHORT
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=600, must-revalidate
X-Cache: HIT: 2
X-Cache-Group: normal
X-Type: default
Content-Encoding: gzip

I’d say move away from Varnish for WooCommerce. Don’t ever cache the home page (and other pages) using Varnish. You are probably doing disservice to your customers, if you still put the blame on Varnish or WPEngine or WooCommerce!

Of course, I am surprised to know that WooCommerce recommends a host that runs Varnish! Probably, there is a way to exclude caching of cookies in the home page and other pages (not related to shopping cart, etc, as mentioned at https://docs.woothemes.com/document/configuring-caching-plugins/ ). I’m unsure about it, though. Need to dig further on this! If anyone knows a solution for WC with Varnish, I am all ears!

“You are probably doing disservice to your customers, if you still put the blame on Varnish or WPEngine or WooCommerce!”

I do not use varnish, nor choose to use varnish and actually this is the first time I have heard of varnish. I am only using the woothemes recommended hosting and WPengine template for woocommerce users. I am not sure you are familiar with WPengine; the caching engine is unique to them. Maybe its a rebranded varnish plugin for all I know.

Assuming you’re correct, I pay for managed hosting, WPengine says that their template makes woocommerce compatible with their caching engine. (And it does somewhat but I don’t think its a complete fix as its still happening)

I do think your comment is jumping to conclusions a bit. (I don’t want to discourage your assistance BTW) I don’t get to pick how their caching plugin operates. I also turned off caching completely and the issues is still occurring. (either caching is not the issue OR it does not completely turn off)

Also this is the link to the recommended hosting. https://www.woothemes.com/hosting-solutions/

If indeed WPengine is using varnish (and assuming your correct) I would hope that since they are partners that WPengine and WooCommerce/Woothemes work together so that others businesses that become popular online are not losing customers like crazy.

I would also hate to pay for a migration to find out that it had nothing to do with caching.

If the problem is related to caching, and you tested by turning your caching plugin off to no avail, there may be an additional element involved.

Caching plugins often alter your .htaccess file. Is it possible that you didn’t flush the .htaccess file of changes related to the caching plugin, when you tested with your caching plugin deactivated?

You’d also need to flush the various other caches I’d expect – cookies, for example – when removing the caching plugin for the test.

The issue is that it is probably hard to make you understand how Varnish or the caching layer in WPEngine works at the moment for your site.

I still work with WPEngine for a couple of my clients, even though not for ecommerce sites. I work with other managed WP companies too. So, I know a fair amount of how things work.

Varnish is a caching server that sits on top of every other layers, including Nginx, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. It doesn’t know what it caches. It can do only one thing regarding caching. If it sees the cookies, by default, it doesn’t cache. *Everything* else is cached. So, each logged-in user in WordPress on a non-ecommerce site, would skip Varnish layer to work with WP backend. On your particular site, WPEngine decided to force Varnish to cache cookies too. Of course, WPEngine has put an exception to other pages, such as shopping cart. That isn’t enough, anyway.

Varnish is not a plugin. Any plugin that you see related to Varnish can only be used to instruct Varnish to clear the cache. Caching happens irrespective of the plugin, by the Varnish server. All tweaks related to Varnish are done at the server-level, not at the plugin level. The plugin does only one thing, telling the Varnish to clear the cache by sending “PURGE” header or “BAN” header.

I hope I cleared up a bit.

Among the hosting companies that are listed by WC, I know that Pressable should work correctly, as it uses Batcache. Batcache, like WP Super Cache, knows what to cache and what not to cache in WC / WP. You can check out my WC demo site at woo.pagespeed.in that runs on WPSC / WC / WP and Nginx. You can throw thousands of visitors into it. It would never do what Varnish does for your site! However, it may go down after a few hundreds visitors, as it runs only on 512MB. ??

@varktech

One can not disable the Varnish plugin in WPEngine. It is a mu-plugin. WPEngine (or any other managed WP host) doesn’t run on Apache either to support .htaccess file!

A related issue seems to have been discussed a lot at https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/issues/3513 .

tl;dr

wc_session_cookie_ no longer exists in WC 2.1, which will be released shortly.

Excellent Pothi

So I am not expert (obviously) your saying this newer update my fix my problem with stuff adding to carts.