Canadian DIY Supply Inc. review for ADU: Automatic Discounts
March 31, 2019
This app worked great for us for about a year. Then, suddenly in January, we had complaints about customers not being able to get through checkout without it timing out. If they had a lot of line items in their cart, it seemed like the app could not update the automatic discount code properly with so many line items. As a result of this, we lost thousands and thousands of dollars. The app developers kept shifting blame to Shopify. Once we deleted the app, we no longer had complaints or issues. It seems that the issue was a combination of something that changed on the Shopify platform, PLUS this automatic discount app that could no longer adjust the discounted pricing at checkout when there were a lot of line items in the cart (typically 50+ line items). I tried reinstalling the app this week, and two days in we started receiving the exact same complaints again. Checkout was timing out for customers so they could not place their orders. We have immediately disabled and deleted this app, and will no longer be using it again. Frustrated that the app developers did not have communication with us, and never truly followed up on the issue.
UPDATE on 05/01/2019: the issue has been resolved. ORIGINAL REPLY: First, I'd like to apologize for the issues. I understand that's very frustrating. Our side, when we first tested by disabling Automatic Discount in your store, we were still able to reproduce the issue. From what I re-read from Shopify's guru Dane, she was as well able to reproduce the issue when Automatic Discount was turned off. Our side, we did contact Shopify App team to figure out a fix. Basically, the issue comes indeed from Shopify's checkout when an order has many items and when the order is edited quite often (products added and removed from cart, quantity changed). This cause a timeout and an error message is displayed at checkout to customers. The way our app works (and many other Shopify apps and scripts), is that it relies on Shopify's checkout to work flawlessly in order to apply one or more requests. If Shopify has this timeout error, our app like many other apps, will multiply this error, because it checks every cart change to achieve its purpose: applying the right discount to the right cart content, automatically. That being said, it explains why some of the store's customers, with an equivalent huge order, see the error message at checkout (the ones editing their cart more often), while some aren't seeing the error (the ones making a straight order with one single visit to checkout). To be honest, we can't explain why the Canadian DIY Supply store didn't have any issue with it for over a year, and then around a month ago started to see this issue at checkout. Shopify should be able to answer. What we know is that, pretty often, Shopify makes changes their side (some we are aware of via their change logs, some are more "obscure" and we're either not informed of, or we miss it until a ticket is opened. We really hope Shopify can fix the source of this timeout error, therefore apps like ours relying on it won't accentuate this issue. We contacted Shopify about it and will again open a forum thread, a ticket, a post in Shopify's Slack group and any possible ways to get some awareness and "votes" to allocate Shopify ressources to fix that. Our side, we've started last week to work on a "patch", which actually is the best we can do: adding an option in our app's settings to reduce the number of requests at checkout. Doing that, some of our features won't work (for example our add-on to display the savings in cart), but for a store like Canadian DIY Supply that has huge orders, it should help a lot. We'll keep you updated about it.
