"Error: Shipping Method Required!" wierdness

I had a customer contact me today saying that he could not check out his cart as he got the "Error: Shipping Method Required!" error all the time. He then sent me a screen shot and the Shipping Method section was completely missing from that page.

Strange.

So I've just done some checking and somehow he'd managed to enter an address into the "address" database table with a zone_id of 0. I modified my test address to have a zone_id of 0 (using phpmyadmin), and low and behold I could reproduce the problem. I'm not sure how he managed to do this, however my work around has been to add an entry to the "zone" table with a zone_id of 0 and make that point at a country_id of 222 (UK for me).

I've just done a search of the address table and I've got 3 other customer addresses (out of 590) with zone_id's of 0. I guess that's 3 lost orders!

Anyway, this post is just to report the problem, however I'd be interested if anyone has any thoughts on the matter....

Gary

Hmm I wonder if this is possible when changing countries that either :
A) Have no zones (like Gibraltar)
or
B) The javascript is disabled so the ajax doesn't load the zones
or
C) Javascript is enabled but the geozones take too long to come back and the customer clicks continue and it saves the empty zone.

Perhaps some validation needs to be set on the zone before allowing the customer to continue with account create.

Hi Qphoria,

Thanks for the thoughts. Just tried it without javascript and that's reproduces the problem, however this also breaks the continue buttons during checkout. So unless they are using selective javascript.....

Thanks,

Gary

fogma wrote: Hi Qphoria,

Thanks for the thoughts. Just tried it without javascript and that's reproduces the problem, however this also breaks the continue buttons during checkout. So unless they are using selective javascript.....

Thanks,

Gary

Yea that's the weird part of this. That's why I'm thinking maybe its not returning fast enough during the ajax lookup sometimes. There should always be "something" in that box... even Gibraltar has "--none--" instead of just empty. Maybe a check can be done on that