Why is Magento resetting my prices to zero?

Is Magento re-setting prices to Zero seemingly randomly? 

Magento query – why are my prices resetting to zero in Magento?

Prices randomly changing to zero in Magento

Prices reverting to £0.0 in Magento

These are the questions/search terms we put into Google when we hit a really worrying problem with a newly launched ecommerce Magento site that we had developed for a client. The site had been tested on a private server and everything worked. We were confident enough to go live.

Four days in and a call came through from the client to say that they were having problems with product prices seemingly randomly reverting to zero and at an alarming rate. To begin with they were not too worried but as time went on they found themselves updating the £00.00 priced products almost hourly – which is when they called us.

We checked everything we could think of. But nothing we did seemed to have any effect. We typed a number of queries into Google to see if this was a problem that anyone else had had and tried a number of things suggested on a whole host of forums – still no improvement and even as we were on the site we could see more products reverting to that £00.00 pricing.

Eight hours in and we were beginning to think we were beaten – one of our developers found a query on stackoverflow ‘Magento setting Prices to Zero – randomly’ this sounded like it could be exactly the problem we were having – But…  no one had put forward any suggestions or solutions. So we did a bit of stalking and eventually found a phone number for the person who had posed the question. We rang them up and explained that we thought we might be having the same problem they were having. Further conversation revealed that they had had the same issue and yes they had fixed it… but then the dreaded words ‘But we have no idea what we did to fix it – one day it simply stopped being a problem’ – Aaargh, this is so not what we wanted to hear.

But there was a lifeline – turns out the site that was having the problems was working with a software that managed their stock and inventory and at the time the problem stopped happening there were some software updates going on.

So perhaps the solution to the issue was not going to be resolved on the Magento back end – perhaps it was about the integration with other software. We went back to the client and asked them to confirm which products they had sold in the past two hours via ebay and amazon – and all the products sold  were ones that had reverted back to a £00.00 price.

So the problem was with the inventory and accounting software integrating with Magento. Each time a product was bought through Amazon or Ebay the set permissions allowed the software to revert the prices back to a £00.00 (zero) price. With a couple of trials we were able to locate the permissions and disable them.

The problem stopped instantly and has not re-occurred. So it wasn’t a Magento problem – but a problem of the software we were integrating with it. If you are having the same problem – with Magento apparently resetting your prices to zero – check any inventory software you are running and that may solve your problem.

Good luck

To find out more about working with the team at Build14me to resolve Magento issues visit www.build14me.com