Due to WooCommerce being a predominantly self-managed webstore service, we have found over time that several users have had connection issues between our system and their WooCommerce servers.
We have found the following to be the most frequent causes and solutions for these issues.
Ensure the correct WooCommerce API is enabled:
The first thing to check with WooCommerce is that you have the correct legacy REST API extension installed, and that it is working as expected.
You can quickly check that the WooCommerce API is enabled by going to your site, and adding /wc-api/v2/ to the url. If this returns an error page, then it means that the correct API extension is not currently enabled, and you will need to install it.
Ensure SSL Settings are correct:
When a connection to WooCommerce fails multiple times, ChannelGrabber will attempt to make a connection via HTTP instead of HTTPS. Your server may require different SSL Settings to be set when connecting, and we have found that many customers can renew the connection to their server by adjusting these settings.
We have now updated our WooCommerce intgration so that you have control over these settings. When connecting a WooCommerce account, or renewing the connection to an existing WooCommerce account, you will see settings for:
SSL Enabled
SSL Used
Ticking / un-ticking these options will adjust how ChannelGrabber initally connects to your server. We recommend trying a few configurations if the connection initally fails. If adjusting these settings do not work we can investigate on our side, if you provide our team with the details you are using to reconnect.
I.P. Whitelisting
If you need to whitelist our I.P.s on your WooCommerce server, the current list of I.P.s that we use can be found below:
88.99.87.13
116.202.29.16
159.69.53.71
159.69.245.34
159.69.245.35
188.40.143.38
5.9.43.128
167.235.182.113
5.9.102.67
46.4.112.51
46.4.112.48
5.9.43.141
167.235.182.119
167.235.182.118
167.235.182.115
167.235.182.114
167.235.182.112
167.235.182.111
2a01:4f8:2200:298e::2
2a01:4f8:2200:298f::2
2a01:4f8:2200:298d::2
2a01:4f8:2200:298b::2
Please ensure that all relevant I.P.s are whitelisted, to ensure that your servers have not blocked any requests.
Presence of caching or security plugins on your WooCommerce hosting/server (eg. Cloudflare, WP Super Cache etc)
By far the most straightforward option is for you or your hosting provider to simply disable any caching or security plugins that may be blocking or altering our connection with WooCommerce. Once this is done, you can return to your WooCommerce settings in ChannelGrabber and re-try the connection again.
Specifically on the topic of Cloudflare, which seems to be the most common caching service for WooCommerce, they have provided a page with guidance on how to configure page rules within Cloudflare, to try and prevent them from blocking access from our API, so if you don't want to disable the service entirely, you can try this approach first: Cloudflare Support: Using Cloudflare with your API
Another known caching plugin is WP Super Cache. Please disable this plugin temporarily and then try connecting to our system again. If that allows you to connect successfully, then you will need to set up an exclusion rule on your plugin before enabling it again. Please see this article - WP Super Cache plugin – How to exclude Shop Pages - for further details. You would need to exclude "/wc-api/" in the "strings" section.
WooCommerce server times out when our system sends requests
This can affect new WooCommerce connections as well as established ones, and indicates a problem with your server setup. There are many reasons this could be, but the most likely reason is because the server is too busy, which can cause intermittent errors.
This could be because your site is busier, or if your WooCommerce site is on a shared server that is also hosting multiple other sites, some of the sites you're sharing with may have become busier.
As a very general suggestion, we've seen less issues from WooCommerce users on dedicated servers than we have on shared servers, so if you're not already on one then you could try a dedicated server, but it's important to note that this is no guarantee that it will fix the issue.
We highly recommend SiteGround as an excellent hosting provider, and at the time of writing this article, any ChannelGrabber customers who have so far switched to SiteGround for their WooCommerce/WordPress site hosting have had any connection issues resolved.
For further assistance with plugins or server issues, we recommend that you should contact your website manager or hosting provider.
If you still need help, contact us via livechat or email us at help@channelgrabber.com