Yahoo! Store V3 Checkout Notes
OK. I just moved my office back to the warehouse. I got
tired of waiting in line for 28.8K modem access. I guess I really live in the
boonies because I have bad, bad copper (wires)! I can't believe I used to build Yahoo! Stores with 28.8K dial-up! Holy Cow! Hopefully, Gundog will have DSL restored any day now. Can't really complain when Katrina wiped lots of folks out.
Am writing the updated portions of the book ( Yahoo! Store / Yahoo! Small Business For Dummies) . This includes everything changed by the new 2005 v3 cart as well as mopping up what hasn't been written yet. Writing a book is really hard, but satisfying! I think I'm becoming a much better communicator because I have to break tasks down into bite-sized steps. For some reason the Dummies folks want everything in a logical order, instead of Tasmanian Devil style stream of consciousness. 
Whoops! Last week I blew up the new v3 shopping cart, but it wasn't because
of a Yahoo! bug, it was because of
weird, custom things that I do on my site.
I have two notes for folks who are playing with the new BETA checkout manager:
(1) When you enable the new v3 checkout, you have to reset your option settings if you want your store to accept orders with unrecognized options. Normally these settings are under the Yahoo! Store manager under order settings > order forms (at the bottom of that screen). Item options validation: I want to allow items with unrecognized options which is how I had it set before I enabled the checkout manager.
The item options validation is supposed to protect you from a hack that allows people to put a negative amount in option like a coupon. If you have a large volume of orders and you're automatically processing those orders, in theory someone should be able to make the price of any item $0 simply by adding an option. Yahoo provided the item options validation to make sure 1) no one's doing that and 2) that all of your items are formatted properly. I guess I'm being lazy. I have line breaks and HTML code and illegal characters in some of my options and I'd haven't had time to go back and clean them up so I allow unrecognized options inside my item options validation. We also hand touch every single order, so when someone orders a $500 product for 10 bucks my guys on the front line will catch it.
(2) If you use the custom add to cart button in RTML, make sure the image does not have a name or you get some weird options. Sometimes I give my custom "add to cart" button a name. When you add something to the cart, it adds a couple of weird options like x=125 and y=17 which will probably spook people out of ordering from you.
More later! Hopefully the rest of the month will be uneventful. September is always insane, but I don't think I can take any more! -- Rob
