auspost modulesIt fails to caculate the postage from time to time

[zhshji]

I am using AustPost-improved model. It fails to caculate the postage from time to time, and shows" ERROR: Unable to obtain a valid quote from the Australia Post Server. You may still checkout using this method and we will contact you with postage costs as soon as possible". It seems the ERROR pops out randomly. Do you have any idea what may cause that? Many thanks.

[RodG]

I am using AustPost-improved model. It fails to caculate the postage from time to time, and shows" ERROR: Unable to obtain a valid quote from the Australia Post Server. You may still checkout using this method and we will contact you with postage costs as soon as possible". It seems the ERROR pops out randomly. Do you have any idea what may cause that? Many thanks.

Random errors such as this can have many possible causes, although most of the time they are network related (Failure to connect to the quotation servers).

Out of necessity, the AustPost module needs to contact two different servers with at least 3 different connections to obtain a full set of quotes, a failure to connect during any one of these times will produce the error.

Historically, it has been the official Australia Post server that has caused most of these issues, but in recent weeks it has been our own server (vcsweb.com) that has been causing the problems, or more specifically, not so much as the server itself, but issues with the network links to our servers... for example, yesterday (Monday 20th July) the server was innaccessible for approx 3hrs due to a fautly link between level3.net and infolink.com. The vcsweb.com server is hanging off of the infolink network. Prior to these recent issues the vcsweb.com server had had full connectivity with a 100% uptime for a little over 400 days straight.

Anyway, as mentioned, historically it has been the official Australia Post server that has had the most issues, as such I have now 'obsoleted; the AustPost shipping module and replaced it with the all new 'ozpost' module. This module has several improvements that will/should avoid many of the random errors. Firstly it is moving toward full independence away from the Australia Post servers (this is development in progress), but more importantly from the zen-cart perpective a full set of quotes is now being provided with a single request to just one server, which should help minimise problems caused by temporary or transient glitches in network connectivity. It also caches quotation results to help minimise these issues even further. Not only do these changes improve reliability, they also give a noticible improvement in the time it takes to recieve a quote.

Another feature of the ozpost module is that if/when there is a network problem, it has a 'fallback' system that will either disable the module completely (thus avoiding the error message) OR it will provide a user defined 'fixed price' quote and display that to the customer instead.

Cheers
Rod

[RedcliffeTech]

Hi Rod,

I've just installed your AustPost shipping module and I'm finding a 10 - 30 second delay in loading shipping estimates is this likely related to the server/network issues you mentioned?

Cheers,

Curtis

[RodG]

Hi Rod,

I've just installed your AustPost shipping module and I'm finding a 10 - 30 second delay in loading shipping estimates is this likely related to the server/network issues you mentioned?

Cheers,

Curtis

Probably.