There are many reasons why a WooCommerce store may have some trouble connecting to Pirate Ship. The steps below will go over some easy settings to check, but you may need to reach out to your site developer for further assistance 😉
Things to check if you can't connect your WooCommerce store to Pirate Ship
Website status: Is your website live? Pirate Ship won't be able to connect to your store if your website is under maintenance, or in password-protected mode.
Base URL: Are you trying to connect to the base URL? For example, you should be connecting to yourwebsitenamehere.com, not yourwebsitenamehere.com/shop 👍
Subdomains like shop.yourwebsitenamehere.com are okay and will work just fine!
Minimum requirements: Does your setup meet the minimum requirements? Here's what they are:
Your WooCommerce plugin should be at least version 3.5 or newer.
Your WordPress installation must be at least version 4.4 or newer.
You must have an SSL certificate installed on your website (https://)
Enter credentials manually: Try logging out of WooCommerce and PirateShip, then try logging in again and enter your credentials manually. Sometimes this helps refresh the connection and get your integration up and running again.
If you get to the login window in WooCommerce, it will look like this:
Error message: If you go to https://yourwebsitenamehere.com/wp-json/wc/v1, do you get an error or a ton of code? For instance, here's an example of our URL with that /wp-json/wc/v1 extension (your website URL will be in the bold area):
Getting a page full of code is a good sign 😊 If you see an error, the built-in API for your website was disabled or deleted. You'll need to work with your website developer to add it back!
Firewall enabled: Do you have a firewall? Sometimes firewalls will block unknown User Agents 🙈
Whitelisting: You will want to whitelist Pirate Ship's User Agent String ("Pirate Ship WooCommerce Integration").
Your web developer can test if everything is working by running the following command: curl --verbose --user-agent "Pirate Ship WooCommerce Integration" https://yourwebsitenamehere.com/wp-json/wc/v1.
You should then receive an HTTP response (200) and JSON result of your store configuration.
Cloudflare users: If you're using Cloudflare, one of the most common issues we see is blocked connections due to Bot Fight Mode 😅 This is one of Cloudflare’s built-in security features, but it can block Pirate Ship’s API requests and prevent us from connecting properly.
We recommend turning Bot Fight Mode off while setting up your connection. Here's how:
Log in to your Cloudflare dashboard and select your account/domain
Go to Security > Bots
For Bot Fight Mode, toggle to Off
Once you're successfully connected, you can re-enable BotFight Mode. You shouldn't run into any further issues 💪
Proper admin credentials: Are you using the right admin credentials to log in to WordPress? To connect the Pirate Ship integration to WooCommerce, you'll need to log in to WordPress using the admin credentials associated with your WooCommerce account, not just another site admin (such as your tech admin, for instance).