Whitelisting Instructions For E-Mail Marketers

I occasionally hear reports from colleagues who sell products, services, and solutions through the 1shoppingcart.com e-commerce solution that customers place orders, but then they themselves do not receive the Order Notices from the cart system that contain the order details (such as what was sold and where it is supposed to be shipped).

This can be a real problem when order notices are supposed to be copied to a fulfillment house, that isn’t receiving the e-mails, which leads to customers not getting what they ordered.

What usually happens is, these colleagues of mine get a notice from their merchant processor (Authorize.net, PayPal, PayFlowPro, etc.) that something was sold, but that notice doesn’t give the details they need.

There are a number of solutions that you can implement if you ever encounter this problem as a 1shoppingcart.com merchant.

1) Log into your cart and go to Setup >> Orders.

In the “Order Notice Email – Secondary Destination” field, enter an alternative e-mail address of yours that is not hosted by your webhost, such as a Yahoo! or GMail account, and see if you get notices there.

This provides a workaround – not an ideal one perhaps, but one that will usually work well at least.

2) When you receive the transaction notice from your merchant processor but don’t get your shopping cart order notice:

• Log into the cart
• Go to Orders >> Regular Orders
• Find the transaction, then click on the date beside it to view all the details
• You can easily generate a Print-friendly version if you need one

3) Install Alternate Destination Splints on the autoresponders that purchasers of your products get connected to after they buy, that details what product was just sold and who bought it, then, as a reminder to yourself on how to get the shipping details, include the instructions from Step 1 above.

This is a great reason to have every product in your cart attached to its own post-purchase autoresponder.  If you are selling bundle offers, you’ll get a separate notice for each component of the bundle so you know exactly what needs shipped or otherwise fulfilled.

4) Send an e-mail FROM the address where you have configured your cart to receive notices (under Setup >> Orders — the “Order Notice Email – Primary Destination” field) to the “bounce” and “system” e-mail addresses that 1SC uses.  There are usually four or five such e-mail addresses.  (Call their tech support to receive the most current ones as they may change from time to time.)

This will usually help to verify that your Primary Destination e-mail address is indeed a legitimate recipient of mail and trigger 1SC’s mail servers to whitelist it.

If your Primary Destination address is a forwarding alias under your website domain, temporarily turn it into a POP account, send the e-mail, then turn it back into a forwarding alias.

5) Have your webhost and/or mail provider whitelist the IP addresses of 1shoppingcart.com’s mail servers.  There are approximately 30 IP addresses in this list.  Call their technical support department to get the updated list as it is subject to change as they add and retire servers.

Follow these steps and, one way or another, it should solve your issue.  Most of the time, Step #1 of this article solves the issue.