Commerce & Easy Post - Rating Calls Issue

[ToeJam]

Hi,

I'm having an issue.  I have a very low traffic site and I'm having Easy Post do my physical shipping in my store.  In 1 month I got charged $100 for 6 physical items shipped.  When I contact them they're telling me below

 

Quote

Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the Rating overage fee that has been assessed on your account. Currently, on the Developer plan, if you create and purchase a Shipment through EasyPost (up to 120,000 per year), then you get one Address Verification call, one Tracker call, and up to three Rating calls included without any overages or additional "per label" fees. Each Rating call in excess of the 3:1 ratio is assessed an overage fee of $.02 per additional call. If you never purchase any labels through EasyPost, then every call will be an overage. This rating overage charge of $96.98 was assessed for the date range 12/25/23 - 01/27/24. 
 
If your company’s volume is higher than what’s provided for in the Developer plan, then we would be happy to evaluate a Custom Plan for you that could possibly be negotiated to include unlimited Rating calls. Let me know if you would like to explore this option, and I can gather some information from you so I can get you in touch with the right team. Please let me know if you have additional questions.

******2nd Email reply******

These fees are not about the amount of products you've sold on your website. These fees are about the number of rating calls being made to our API that are in excess of the 3:1 ratio I mentioned previously. Overage fees for excess Rating calls and AVS calls are only assessed once per month by our Finance team. Unfortunately, we don't have reporting available for these overages, as it is simply the total number of Rating/AVS calls compared with the number of labels purchased over a specific period of time.
 
Our active, accessible Request Logs only go back about 11 days, and in that timeframe, I'm seeing about 1961 Rating calls, but 0 labels have been purchased. This likely will result in an overage fee in the amount of around $39.22 for that time period. Sadly, I'm not able to compile this information into any sort of report and I would recommend reaching out to your third-party application or developer to reduce the amount of calls. 

I'm getting charged on these "Rating calls". What is this, is it caused by bots?  I have a very low traffic site like I said, it's dedicated to a small industry trade.

[Jim M]

Are you constantly checking rates or anything? If no, you would want to check your traffic and server logs for information about if this is malicious or not.

[ToeJam]

What logs do I check for this?  

Also, when you say checking rates, are you saying viewing a product, or going to far as to put it in a cart get ready to check out but not complete it by paying....or something along those lines?

 

Thanks

Erik

[Jim M]

2 hours ago, ToeJam said:

What logs do I check for this?  

You would want to contact your hosting provider or server administrator if you are not comfortable or have the knowledge to do this kind of log investigation on your server.

2 hours ago, ToeJam said:

Also, when you say checking rates, are you saying viewing a product, or going to far as to put it in a cart get ready to check out but not complete it by paying....or something along those lines?

These would be shipping rates.

[ToeJam]

53 minutes ago, Jim M said:

You would want to contact your hosting provider or server administrator if you are not comfortable or have the knowledge to do this kind of log investigation on your server.

These would be shipping rates.

Attaching a screen shot of my Invoices, some things failed...where I guess they would have been giving shipping rates, but for the date span they are telling me in the last 11 days they got nearly 2,000 rating calls.

Here I see 10 failed tries, and only 6 physical products sold. (Last 30 Days)

I can't find where permissions are, but I'm sure you have to be logged in to attempt to purchase something, or be a member.  Wait, I do see guest, but that is logged.  

Or am I just not fully understanding how tis works.

 

 

Thanks

 

[teraßyte]

Looking at the code, there are 3 places the EasyPost Rates API is called:

1. Testing the settings in ACP.
2. Viewing a physical product's page (to figure out shipping rates/time)
3. The shipping step in the checkout process.

 

The code tries to retrieve the rates automatically only if you enabled the Allow Customer to Choose Rate? option in ACP.

When this setting is enabled viewing a physical product makes 1 request to the rates API. If a member refreshes the page 10 times or views 10 separate physical products, without purchasing anything, that makes it 10 API requests with no purchase.

This happens also when the page is being viewed by a bot. Maybe some bot aggressively indexed your site and caused all those requests? At the very least it should not execute the API call for bots, but I don't see any kind of block in the code right now.

 

I think there should be a warning added for this. Maybe this was not something EasyPost did when the API was initially implemented into Invision Community. 🤷‍♂️

Edited February 6 by teraßyte

[ToeJam]

So, right now I'm getting charged up the ring yang for this by EasyPost.  It's been some time, but is there a way to shut off guest view of the shopping cart/store?  I thought there was but can't seem to find it.  

 

Thanks

[Marc]

Take a look at module permissions, which is what I believe you are looking for

 

 

[ToeJam]

I don't see anything for permissions there for guests and bots for the store.  Wasn't there something somewhere that doesn't allow guests or bots to purchase or put items in the cart.  I thought there wa something there that if you were not logged in, it would tell you you must be a registered member to purchase?

[Marc]

Expand the commerce section, and you can click the lock icon at the side of the store. You can deselect for guests, so they wouldnt see the store at all

 

[ToeJam]

Thanks Marc

So I'm trying to figure out a way where guests and spiders can view but not make a purchase or trigger where they can see shipping rates.  I played with Commerce > Billing & Purchases > permissions.  This didn't look like it affected anything when deselecting.

I logged to and went in as a guest, posting pics in order.

Store View

 

Item in a category

 

Item to select 

 

Checking out

 

 

Clicking Checkout and now I need to Login to proceed

 

 

 

So this is my normal process.  So if I'm not able to get past this point and no shipping rates, why would this count against me as this "ratings call"?  When I go to the ACP I see that a guest tried to make a purchase

 

 

If I deselect Guests & Spiders (Billing & Purchases) I can still make it as far as above and the attempt or pending invoice is still visible in the ACP.  Are the Billing & Purchases permissions not working?

 

 

 

I would rather not block guests and especially spiders outright, but I'll do whatever it takes I suppose.  

 

[Jim M]

I have tagged this to a developer to confirm when the rate check is performed. 

[ToeJam]

31 minutes ago, Jim M said:

I have tagged this to a developer to confirm when the rate check is performed. 

Thank you very much Jim

[ToeJam]

I have my logs too.  maybe they can tell me what would register as a rate.  I can't find much other than spiders viewing products

[ToeJam]

Any feed back?  I have my logs for January, I just don't know what would count as the rate call.

 

Thanks

[Jim M]

Unfortunately, dev reviews can take longer than our normal support queue just due to the advanced nature of it.

[ToeJam]

Okay

[ToeJam]

Can I get someones email address here from IPB Support so I can include in with the support ticket I have with Easy Post, I need to get a three way conversation so I can get this solved, I'm going in circles with them telling me it's a IPB issue....and I can't get them to tell me from my logs provided what they saying is activating the rate calls

If someone form here is talking with their support team from here my ticket number is 393552

 

 

Thanks

[Marc]

We would not talk with your external suppliers. That would be something for yourself to do. I will see if I can get someone to take a look at this topic for you, however I would say its been answered above here

Do you have that setting switched on? If you do, Im not sure what other answer you are looking for there, as the answer is already present in this topic

[ToeJam]

8 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

We would not talk with your external suppliers. That would be something for yourself to do. I will see if I can get someone to take a look at this topic for you, however I would say its been answered above here

Do you have that setting switched on? If you do, Im not sure what other answer you are looking for there, as the answer is already present in this topic

Are you referring to this?  Allow Customer to Choose Rate

If so, where is this setting?  Is this where in each physical product has Shipping Method?  Or is this something else?

 

 

If this is somewhere else is it something to decide something like Ground, express saver, express next Day?

 

Thanks

[teraßyte]

The EasyPost integration is a Community Enhancement.

 

You can refer to this guide to find the setting I mentioned (see the 2nd and 4th screenshots):

Edited February 21 by teraßyte

[ToeJam]

1 hour ago, teraßyte said:

The EasyPost integration is a Community Enhancement.

 

You can refer to this guide to find the setting I mentioned (see the 2nd and 4th screenshots):

So I set it to Customer cannot choose, and tried to do a purchase with a random address that is physical and it shows this "Cannot send to your location". I'm a little confused, am I by not allowing customer to choose preventing EZ Post, or is it supposed to limit variations of shipping services such as FedEX ground options all the way to Next Day

 

[Marc]

It should limit to what is available on your system to be used for that address. The message there would indicate you dont have anything set up that can use that address.