If you placed an order for the Emergent Task Planner European A4 Pad in the past 4 weeks, it looks like the order got hung in the system.

We’re using a plugin called WP-Ecommerce, which is a popular free plugin that has premium add-ons. I’m not sure what it is about e-commerce, but this is an area filled with all kinds of confusing terminology and murky processes, and any mis-step gives rise to silent failure.

I dove into Google Analytics to see if the pages were even being visited, using the unexpectedly-cool “goal funnel” feature:

On the left is the source traffic, sorted by region/country. Google sees that 2500 people hit the Productivity Tool page in this time period. About 1500 of those people hit the Emergent Task Planner Page. Of those, 264 people soldiered on to the ETP PAD page, and 16 people then visited the CHECKOUT page. But after that…nothing.

Was it something about the design of the page itself? I looked at it again and saw just how poorly positioned some of the autogenerated content is (the “PAY” button, for example, is small and tiny). This can clearly be fixed. But then I clicked to order and was surprised to see that nothing seemed to happen. I checked the admin dashboard and saw that an order had been registered by the system, but nothing else happened. Silent failure.

After a bit of digging, it turned out that there is a “transaction results” page that wasn’t being triggered, because it wasn’t named as expected. A pop into the secret WordPress Options Editor fixed it, and now it appears to work. So if you’d like to try again, the A4 Pads are still in-stock and available. If you have any problems with the order process, feel free to email me via the contact form.