Auto Coupon stopped working 9 hours before expiry

[daniel.moore]

Hi,

We had a strange issue last night where our auto coupon just stopped working a whole 9 hours before expiry!!

We have checked the time/date/timezone settings on the server and in WordPress, all is correct. This morning, I have removed the expiry date and the auto coupon is now working again but this issues is really strange, we’ve never had it before and there is no explination as to what happened.

Please can you advise?

Website is sbcgels.com.

Kind Regards

[Soft79]

Strange. According to WC documentation it uses your site’s time zone setting at Settings > General > Timezone in WordPress. See https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/coupon-management/

Since this is handled by WC itself, I advise you to contact Automattic.

[daniel.moore]

Hi,

I can confirm our Timezone settings, clock and date were, and still are, all correct, but this was my first thought too.

You mention in the changelog of the plugin that the Auto Coupon feature had been rewritten, may I ask why? Were there any problems with it? Anything that could be related to this?

We were running version 3.0.4 when we ran into issues, as of this morning (UK Time) we are now on the latest version.

As for the issue we experienced, whilst it looks resolved now, we would still like to understand what is happening in the background so we can best prevent ourselves from running into it in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll speak with Automattic and see what they can tell me about this, I’ll share any findings.

Kind Regards

[Soft79]

What expiry date was set for the coupon? What day+time did the coupon stop working?

Between 3.0.4 and 3.0.7 the auto coupon logic has not been altered.

[daniel.moore]

Hi,

Expiry date was 1st March 2019 and it stopped around 15:00 on 28th February 2019.

As for the logic not being altered, I’m confused, it says it has been in your changelog?

[Soft79]

That was in version 3.0.0, which was released in september 2018.

When was the expiry date last adjusted before the issue occured?

[daniel.moore]

Wednesday 27th February 2019 at roughly 2pm (UK Time)

[Soft79]

Is it possible that the coupon didn’t work at all?

If in doubt you could disable High performance mode, but I don’t think it’s related.

[daniel.moore]

Hi,

This is where I started to get confused… it was working on all orders up until 3pm.

To walk through this coupons life…

It went Live at 00:00 on Wednesday 27th.
All orders that qualified the minimum spend after this time up until 15:00 on Thursday 28th had this coupon in the order! I’ve come in today at 08:30 (Friday 1st) and found the coupon to be in an expired state, as expected. As of right now, the coupon is live without expiry and is working fine, but I did that manually this morning.

This issue is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before! The question is though, what caused it?

I spoke to Automattic, they said that it is the Extended Coupons PRO plugin that allows auto coupons and they advised to investgate the plugin…

What is interesting in all this, I created a new coupon this morning (offering no discounts, just something to try) and it worked perfectly, as expected, as coupons have been working for us up until last night!
The logs of the server, WooCommerce and every other aspect of the site have been checked, there is nothing there that could explain this behaviour.

We have abandoned/cancelled orders though from people who have got in touch, so the issue is 100% having an impact on more than 1 customer…

We checked cache too but the cart and checkout pages are excluded from that and those are the only pages on our store that we allow the coupon to appear. – Again, this morning when I created a test coupon, all worked perfectly fine! I, myself haven’t been able to replicate, but I can see the evidence from our customers that something went wrong.

Kind Regards

[Author]

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