Upgraded a website to the latest version of the e-commerce platform WooCommerce.

Shipping options disappeared, no longer available – customers would simply have been unable to pay for shipping. I’d made no changes to shipping settings.

Thought to myself, “hmmm… wade through someone else’s code to find the problem, or go through the back-and-forth exchange of support tickets…”  I opted for the latter.

A couple of days later, after that back-and-forthing, the support guy gives me a debug option. I turn it on and see that the problem is WooCommerce doesn’t recognise the postcode I’ve entered so thinks the business doesn’t ship to that address.

I dig a little deeper and find some documentation that refers to postcode ranges as, for example, “7000…7050” rather than “7000-7050” as I have them set up. “Surely not?”, thinks I… I change it and it works.

I check the change log for WooCommerce and there’s no mention of this change. I tell the support guy what I’ve found and point out that there seems to have been an undocumented change to a fundamental part of the software. He acknowledges the issue, says he can’t find the change documented either, says he thinks the hyphenated format should’ve been automatically converted to the elipsis format on upgrade, but also acknowledges that the WooCommerce documentation still lists the hyphenated format in its examples, and they’ll need to get that changed.

Number of times WooCommerce has been downloaded at time of writing: 15 million.  Claiming it powers 37% of all online stores. And I’m the first one to find this??