Hello,

I recently switched to shipstation and have just noticed an issue I am having. It seems that shipstation is not importing any order from any day other than the current date. Here is an example:

Customer places order on Saturday 2/12 and order status in ECT changes to New Order. New order is not mapped to anything in shipstation nor do I want it to be. On Monday, 2/14 I pick and charge the order through ECT and change the status to one that I created "Paid - Ready to Ship". This is mapped to awaiting shipment in shipstation. Nothing shows up in shipstation unless their tech support does a back date refresh. Then it works fine and when shipped in shipstation marks the ECT status as paid and adds the tracking info. If I do the same thing with an order that was placed on 2/14 (or any day that is the current date), everything works normally without the backdated refresh (Which is why I didn't notice it until after the weekend).

Shipstation Tech support looked at everything including the XML feed from ECT and said it looked normal. They suggested the issue was on the ECT side of things.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Phil

Hi Phil
I have a suspicion that this is somehow to do with the date format. But what I've done is add a bit of debug to the file...
vsadmin/ajaxservice.asp
I've added the code to the ajaxservice.asp file for both the v7.3 and v7.4 updaters so can you copy whichever one applies and then set the following in your includes.asp file...
debugmode=TRUE
Then try a shipstation update that should fail. This should send you an email message with debug info and could you send that to me at vince AT ecommercetemplates DOT com. Please do remember to take the debugmode=TRUE parameter out of your includes.asp file or you may see debug messages on the site.

Vince

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Just sent. Thanks

Phil

Hi Phil
I had a look at the output you sent and I think it may have to do with a particular order "37235" which uses a non-standard ASCII character, and it may be that ShipStation is simply erroring on receiving that character. Can you edit that order, and where you see...
at least (2) 4½ sections
...change that "half" character to say...
at least (2) 4 1/2 sections
Then try importing again. If that does seem to be the problem I think the answer would be to change to UTF-8 which would involve adding this to your includes.asp file...
adminencoding="utf-8"
But also you would need to change this tag on your site...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
...to this...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Vince

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Hi Vince,

I tried both of those suggestions and no luck. I was having this problem before that order was placed so I doubt that was causing it. Looking at the debug file, it seems to be only looking for orders within the past 24hrs when it imports...

Phil

Hi Phil
Sorry, I just assumed the date range was what you had set it to. But in that case everything is looking pretty much as it should do. Can we ask the ShipStation support how many days back they are looking for changed orders by default? And if it is only for the last day, how can you configure it to a longer period?

Vince

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Ah.... this has happened to us a few times... once last week

The order never imported to ShipStation and we had to manually add it.

I never checked the date but I'm sure this is the issue.

Patrick

Hi Vince,

I contacted shipstation support again and they are looking into it. It seems making the change to UTF-8 has messed up a bunch of my products descriptions. Its added � where there should be " marks. I tried changing it back to what it was before and removing the line from includes but no luck. Any ideas? A lot of my product descriptions are unreadable now.

Phil

Fixed the " issue. I just did a find and replace in excel to correct the affected products. Still waiting to hear back from shipstation.

Phil

After several back and forths with shipstation, It seems that by design, it only looks for orders within the past 24hr. Here is what they sent me:

Hello Phillip-
Thanks for your patience as I reached to Senior Support for more insight and possible solutions.

So as you might already know the way our import tool is designed it will only try to pull in orders from the date of the last refresh. Presently there is not a user facing way to perform a backdated refresh.

I encourage you to submit that feedback to our ideas forum here: We love hearing your suggestions and ideas! To request a feature, you can post your idea in our Ideas forum or comment and add kudos to existing ideas. The team reviews these ideas regularly to guide our product roadmap. Let us know how a certain feature could impact your business and improve how you work, and our team will take it under consideration.

https://community.shipstation.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/Ideas

In the meantime you might be able to get with your developer to see if there potentially would be a way to adjust the order date when you are changing it to a mapped status so it imports with the rest of the orders, or another alternative is to create and use a manual store for those one off items.

I hope this information helps. If you need any additional assistance, feel free to reach out to Support. Have a wonderful day!



This got me wondering if maybe it was possible for ECT to pass the date/time the order was changed to one of the mapped status instead of the actual order date/time. For example, the order was placed on Saturday 2/26. It was changed to the paid - ready to ship status (which is mapped to shipstations awaiting shipment) on Monday 2/28. The ECT XML link would send then send the date at 2/28. This would trick shipstation into thinking the order was placed on 2/28 and it would import. I think this is what shipstation tech support was eluding too. I tried mapping the New order filed to shipstation but the problem is it doesn't update to ready to ship if its more than 24 hrs old (Again, customer places order on Saturday, by Monday it won't import).

Any ideas to get shipstation to work would be appreciated. I really liked the way it worked but if I can't get it to import orders more than 24hrs old, I guess I'll have to go back to manually typing addresses...

Thanks,

Phil

When you change the status of the order, an updated date stamp is applied.
At that point, you should import your order and it should work.
We take orders all weekend and they all impost just fine on Monday ad we only import from an "authorized" we move them to when we have reviewed and printed the order.

I think you can fix your issue with a slight change in the way you handle orders.

Thanks,
David

Thats pretty much what we are doing now. Orders come in as "New Order" and are not mapped to shipstation. They are then changed to "order printed" when we print them and then we change them to "Paid-Ready" to ship after we print and pick them but they only import to shipstation if they were placed within the prior 24hrs. "Paid ready to ship" is the only field that's mapped to shipstation of the three so it sounds like we are already processing the orders the same way and the new date stamp should be applied.

Phil

Hi,

Still trying to figure out this issue. I have noticed that the few orders that do get imported have the wrong date and time. This led me to do a bit of digging with shipstation support and it appears that ECT is trying to export orders 1 day in the future (Which is why it's not finding most of them). Here is a copy of the debug that is sent to me when I try to import orders by ECT.

GET parameters
GET: SS-UserName : XXXXXXXXXX
GET: SS-Password : XXXXXXXX
GET: page : 1
GET: action : export
GET: start_date : 03/17/2022 00:06
GET: end_date : 03/17/2022 14:06
isdate(start_date): True
isdate(end_date): True

What's interesting is I am trying to import orders on 3/16 at 14:06, not 3/17. This is why it's not finding any and only imports when they run a back date refresh for all orders. Seems like something on my cart needs to be changed to export the correct date but I can't figure out what. Username and PW are correct, I just X'd them out.

Thanks,



Phil

Hi Phil
I think I see what the problem is and I think it is to do with the UTC timezone offset. I've made a small change to your vsadmin/ajaxservice.asp file so can you try now and see if it helps?

Vince

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No luck yet. The one order it did import was placed this morning however shipstation shows it as being placed yesterday. Several orders were placed this morning but only the one showed up. Makes me think it's still not correctly sending the right date.

Phil

Hi Phil
I've added another line of debug that should show the SQL for the orders that are being extracted from the database. Could you do the same adding debugmode=TRUE and send me the results. I really think this is the key here so hopefully this will give us the answers we need.

Vince

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Here's what came back:

GET parameters
GET: SS-UserName : XXXXXX
GET: SS-Password : XXXXXX
GET: page : 1
GET: action : export
GET: start_date : 03/17/2022 18:10
GET: end_date : 03/18/2022 20:55
isdate(start_date): True
isdate(end_date): True
SELECT ordID,... FROM orders INNER JOIN orderstatus ON orders.ordStatus=orderstatus.statID WHERE ordDate BETWEEN CAST('2022-03-18T01:10:00' AS DATETIME) AND CAST('2022-03-19T03:55:00' AS DATETIME).

I ran the import at 03:55 GMT on 03/18. Latest order came in at 03:07 GMT and was not imported. Seems like it's still looking a day in advance. My server is in Pacific Time if it helps.

Thanks,


Phil

Hi Phil
Still not resolved but I've added some more debug that will come directly to me when you sync so you don't have to do anything.

Vince

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Thanks,

I just tried an import.

Phil

Hi Phil
Ok, I got the debug and there seems to be 7 orders sent to ShipStation which are all New Orders. Did they import?

Vince

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Looks like those 7 did import. There are orders from yesterday that did not.

Phil