Stamps.com double quantities issue

[In2Deep]

I'm using 1.5.4

After you batch it out, Stamps.com software frequently shows double the quantities for online orders. This means that I have to log on to the site admin and verify every order. Anyone else have this issue and more importantly know how to fix it?

[HeleneWallis]

It's not fixable. Here is why it happens. Stamps.com 'pings' your site (their terminology) to see whether you have any order statuses that fall within the parameters you want to be picked up. They do this at regular intervals, though I wasn't able to get them to say specifically how often. Their reasoning for this is that if they only picked up orders at the time when you tell the software to import them, their servers could be overwhelmed with companies all processing their orders at once (imagine a wave of hourly demands on their servers as companies across the country hit that 9am or 10am point, whatever their cutoff is for processing new orders). So they pull in orders constantly throughout the 24 hours.

If an order has been in your system for more than an hour or so, it may be picked up more than once and appear on the screen as having multiples of what the customer actually ordered. Or conversely, if the order came in at the last minute before your cutoff point, it may not be picked up at all, and you'll have to enter it manually (and do without the 'postback' that changes the status to 'Shipped' and puts the tracking number in the comments). The problem with the first situation, of course, is that the shipping weight is wrong and you have to manually edit it in Stamps.com. I was going back to verify orders, but I've never seen any discrepancies other than the order detail having been picked up more than once, so I no longer do that.

What we have done to get around this is to leave all our orders with the 'New Order' status (which doesn't get picked up because we excluded it from the list). About an hour before we want to start printing labels, we go in and change them all to 'Processing.' If there are a lot of orders, this is a slow and irritating process, but it's the best way we have found to keep multiple orders from being picked up. A snippet of SQL code to change all "New Order' statuses to 'Processing,' would be really great, but I haven't had time to pick through that part of orders.php and see what it's doing.

Stamps.com has its issues, and we are on the point of outgrowing its capabilities. But I've been looking at the options and I honestly don't see one I like any better. The other shipping integrators have their own problems. The tech support people at stamps.com are super. They will work with you for as long as it takes to get something fixed, and if you show them that you understand the technical end of it (especially if you can make their diagnostic work easier by changing things on the fly while they're testing), they are happy to explain things in detail. If I were younger and looking for a job in that industry, I would want to work for them. A good work environment makes for happy tech employees who are able to help customers at length if needed, and that tells me a lot about the company all by itself.

[In2Deep]

Thanks for the info!