Shipping Methods not available!

[dal2016]

Hello, 

I have a unique problem. I've 1.9.2.3 CE version. Some people say they can't proceed after entering their address. instead of getting their shipping methods (I use USPS), they get a message in place of the shipping methods that say "No shipping method available". The problem is that I go to the website and test it, and I see it fine. 

I tried one and I had the same issue. I tried 10 min later, and it worked. What's the issue and how can I resolve it. I'm really a newbie here. 

Thanks and I appreciate your time. 

[Damian Culotta]

Hi @dal2016,

You could (or should) see that message only when the shipping address can't match with a valid address for your configured shipping methods.

Can you check if that could be the case?

[dal2016]

thank you for responding. The address is correct. I don't know what's causing this issue. Sometime it occurs and sometimes it goes away on its own. but now, it seems more frequent and people are complaining. Is there anything that I can provide to help troubleshoot this issue? It seems like there are a lot of people with the same issue, but no one has really figured it out.

[Damian Culotta]

I guess you could activate the Magento logs and check if there's a message on system.log or an exception (exception.log).

Also, you should check your webserver error logs to check if there is some clue on those logs too.

[dal2016]

@Damian Culotta Can you provide some information on how I can enable those logs and where to find them? I enabled the DEBUG mode for USPS but nothing really valuable I was able to get from the log files.

My issue here is that it works for some people but doesn't work for others. I don't know if there are API changes in the past 2 updates on Magento that caused this or not. 

I'm running 19.2.2 and I'm considering to upgrade to the latest 1.9.3.4 but I couldn't find any clear instructions on how to upgrade because this process seems different than installing a regular Patch that ends with (.sh). 

[Damian Culotta]

You can activate the Magento logs on System -> Configuration

System -> Configuration

Then, at bottom

Advanced -> Developer

 Now you need to enable the logs by:

Enable Magento's logs

Now you'll find into the /path/to/magento/var/log directory at least two log files: system.log and exception.log (at least if there are errors to log)

[dal2016]

Logs are enabled but I'm not sure what to look for? All I see is other unrelated messages. Is upgrading to the new version going to help with this? more people are reporting the issue while others are fine. This is very confusing.

[wsasales]

Hi

Its probably the USPS service being down. We monitor the shipping apis and they are surprisingly down much more often than you would think. But it could also be an issue when certain items are in the cart its not returning rates, etc, sounds like you have looked at that tho.

One way to monitor this is to switch on logging for a day and then you can search for the error message and see whats going on. Obviously just be aware of impact logging may have on server performance. 

Karen