Getting USPS shipping working with Store 2.20

Question

I am running Store 2.20 and EE 2.73 and I am running into Fatal error: Uncaught exceptions using the USPS shipping extension 1.01. Everything is installed and I have two products with all the dimensions added such as weight, length, width and height. Here is an image of my product entry info.

Every time I try to add a product to the cart, I always get a fatal error stating that Dimensions are missing for package; unable to calculate postage. Additional Info: All dimensions must be greater than 0.

This is a pretty intrusive error when someone is just trying to add a product to their cart and not actually going through the checkout process. Does Store call the shipping method every time a product is added to the cart? Is there a better way to handle the uncaught exceptions than killing the site? Also, I get a guzzle error stating that Couldn't resolve host 'production.shippingapis.com' [url] http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll?. This happens pretty regularly as well. I have used Store 1.65 with the same credentials without any issues for the past few months and only started seeing this when I upgraded to Store 2.20. At the moment, a user can not even add products to a cart without one of these errors happening.

Answer 1

Regarding the first error:

Dimensions are missing for package, unable to calculate postage.

It sounds like you have fixed this by changing the "Size" option from Large to Regular in the USPS extension settings.

Regarding your second error:

Couldn't resolve host 'production.shippingapis.com'

This means that your server cannot communicate with the outside world. It's likely a problem with your web host/server (for example, a firewall blocking external requests). It's strange that it only happens sometimes though. I would test it on a different host (for example, locally), or ask your web host whether they have anything which may be blocking "curl" requests. If this is a problem for communicating with USPS, it's likely going to be a problem communicating with your payment gateway too, so it's worth getting fixed.

It's also possible that USPS was experiencing downtime while you were testing (which would explain the intermittent failures), but this seems less likely.

We're working to improve the error handling inside shipping methods, so forgive the user-unfriendly errors. However, in general, except for major issues like this (unable to communicate with USPS), the shipping extensions will normally fail silently so that your customers can continue shopping.