X-Cart Classic v 4.6.3: Amazon Payments, PayPal Access, another USPS update

According to PayPal’s Statistics, there were 110+ million active accounts in 2013. “PayPal Access” was initially aimed at streamlining the registration process in your store for these very millions of customers. This feature used to be supported in X-Cart v.4, but when PayPal changed the API this autumn, the integration was broken, and it turned out that the update required complex changes. That’s why we decided to include it into a new release, not to give out a huge and hard-to-apply patch.

With “Amazon Payments”, hundreds of millions of Amazon customers can pay on your site with the information already stored in their Amazon accounts. Just like PayPal access, it makes checkout faster for your buyers – they do not need to enter their shipping and billing info again and again. This module used a line of code of another module, removed in 4.6.2, so with the release of that version we found out a fault: “Amazon Payments” was no longer available. The fix was given out on the forum right away, and it was also included into version 4.6.3.

USPS announced an upcoming update (effective March, 07,2014 at approximately 12.01 Central Time), as a result of which “USPS First Class Mail” shipping method will become unavailable in existing X-Cart 4 stores. It’s being renamed to “First-Class Mail Stamped Letter”.

In X-Cart 4.6.3 this update is already taken into account, if you run an older version and do not want to upgrade, you have 2 simple options:

• Option One: If you use version 4.5.0 and higher, go to USPS settings page of your store and select checkbox ‘Automatically enable new shipping methods from shipping server response’. Do not forget to disable it after the update, if you want to make sure that another shipping method will not appear in your store without your “approval” one day.
• Option Two: After March, 7th, find the new method in X-Cart admin area (yourdomain.com/admin/shipping.php) manually and activate it ( note, it will appear AFTER the changes are implemented on USPS side).
• Option Three: Apply the SQL patch below. Note, you should do it only after the “First Class mail” method disappears, which would mean that the announced USPS changes went live. Otherwise, you will hide the method available currently, and the new one will not be available either (so far).

UPDATE xcart_shipping SET `shipping` = "USPS First-Class Mail##R## Stamped Letter" WHERE `code` = "USPS" AND `subcode` != "" AND shipping= "USPS First-Class Mail##R## Letter";