The complaints you will actually get — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This lesson is for you if buyers write to GadgetSphere about the e-invoice request page and you would rather answer than escalate. Six complaints cover almost all of it, each has one cause that is not on any screen, and about eleven minutes here will save you the same investigation six times.

Step 1 — “The e-invoice page does not work at all”

After this step you will fix the failure that looks like six different failures. The storefront has no anonymous session of its own. Until a shopper signs in it authorises every call with a public key stored on the record for that hostname, and if that key is missing the app sends an empty credential. The page still renders, the search form still appears, and every single search fails on authorisation. So “nothing works, but the page loads” almost always means a hostname record without its public key. It is one setting, on one record, and it is the most likely cause of the complaint.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — The public key is the whole guest path

Step 2 — “It says there is no matching record”

After this step you will stop assuming the shopper mistyped. The search matches exactly on everything supplied. The amount must equal the pool row to the sen, the date is read in Malaysian time so a late-evening purchase can be reported a day out by a traveller, and the invoice number is matched against the document’s own first number rather than anything printed beside it. Two useful moves: send them to the PIN search, which needs only the number and the PIN, and check your side for whether the document ever reached a pool at all. A document that never arrived can never be found.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — Troubleshooting

Step 3 — “I cannot pick the date on my receipt”

After this step you will recognise a deliberate limit rather than a bug. The date picker only offers dates inside a window your own company setting defines. With no value configured the shopper may only choose dates in the current calendar month. With a day-of-month value set, last month stays reachable until that day passes, and then it closes. That is a grace period for people who ask in the first week of the new month, and it is yours to widen. It is also only the picker — the search itself applies no window, which is why the PIN search still finds an older receipt.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — The request window

Step 4 — “It says a request was already made”

After this step you will never again take that sentence at face value. Those words are shown for every failure of the request call. A genuine duplicate produces them. So does an authorisation failure, and so does a network error. Read the message as “the request did not go through” and nothing more. Before you tell a buyer that somebody already asked, look up the document on your side: if the pool row is untouched and there is no submission behind it, nobody asked, and what they hit was a failure with an unfortunate label.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — After the request

Step 5 — “The Update button stays grey”

After this step you will answer this one in a sentence. The profile form will not let anybody save until the tax number has been checked, and checked against the exact identification type and identification number sitting in the form at that moment. Press Verify TIN. If it comes back not valid, the combination itself is wrong — the number and the identity document must belong together, which is what the check is for. The other frequent cause is invisible: both fields reject whitespace, so a tax number pasted out of a document with a trailing space will never verify.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — Troubleshooting

Step 6 — “I never got the e-mail”

After this step you will know when to stop waiting and just look it up for them. A guest’s only route back to their request is one message carrying a twelve-character access key, and that message is composed only when the request finished as a success or as a failure. Any other state sends an empty body, and a delivery failure is not reported anywhere. There is no resend. So treat a missing e-mail as information about the request rather than about the mail: find the document by its number on your side, and tell the buyer where it actually stands.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — Troubleshooting

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — 'The e-invoice page does not work at all'"]
  s2["Step 2 — 'It says there is no matching record'"]
  s3["Step 3 — 'I cannot pick the date on my receipt'"]
  s4["Step 4 — 'It says a request was already made'"]
  s5["Step 5 — 'The Update button stays grey'"]
  s6["Step 6 — 'I never got the e-mail'"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Open the door properly, and know when it closes · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation