Displayed Logged-in Customer Group Pricing to All Logged Out Users

[karimalvizo]

We have a store front that displays one of our items priced at $2,180.00 and we have several Customer Groups with discounted premiums assigned. For example, when Group A is logged in, the customers should see the discounted price at $1,870.00 and so forth.

For a few hours, our website displayed the price of $1,870.00 to all users that were logged out causing a big loss on our sales. We received several notifications confirming this error on our site. However, when a colleague and I visited the front-end site we saw the proper price of $2,180.00. I then logged on to the Administrator's side of Magento, I ensured there were no Promotions being displayed and that our pricing per customer groups were accordingly. Everything seemed to be as it should be.

What could have gone wrong? It doesn't make sense. How can we prevent this from happening again?

• After confirming everything was correct, I flushed the cache and the right price showed in everyone's browsers. Is this a Caching issue? If so, how does Magento display a "logged-in only" price to all "logged-out" customers? 

• In the past several weeks, someone in our company modified the titles for all of our Customer Groups. They went from "Customer Group 1" to "Customer Group A" and so forth. Could this have caused some confusion in Magento?
• We also recently implemented CRM Dynamics, NAV and AvaTax to our Magento. Could the interaction of these technologies with our site be a result of such incident?
• Lastly, as an alternative option... it could have been a temporary human error.

Thank you guys for your help! I look forward to reading your comments.

[Sinisa]

It could be caching issue, but that would manifest only as "frontend" issue, which means you see one price, but when you add to the cart, you'll actual price. So, I don't think that it was caching issue in your case.

How did you set up prices per Customer Group? Have you used "group price" feature on every product separately, or you had another approach?

It should not be due to change of Customer Group names, as long as they maintained the same customer_group_id in the database.

[karimalvizo]

Thank you for your response Sinisa.

We are using Group Price... and the price it incorrectly displays to logged out users is the price it should only display for a logged in Customer Group.

It did it again today and the price reverts back to the original (correct) price when the item is added to the cart.

I also get the "One or more of the Cache Types are invalidated: " every morning. Could this be the issue? Any suggestions on how to solve it?

Thanks again!

Karim

[Sinisa]

When that happens (wrong price for a logged-out customer), try to clean the cache from the admin, and if it fixes the issue (temporary), then it's really caching issue.

If it still doesn't fix the issue, try to visit the same page from incognito window / private browser, to check if cookies are used for defining part of the cache key.

"One or more of the Cache Types are invalidated" means that data which is cached (and probably displayed to the customers) doesn't represent the real value from a database. It happens when you, for example, update product data overnight, without clearing the cache. Then it may happen that Customer sees stall data.