Commerce Cloud lets you offer fallback shipping methods to shoppers when it cannot connect to your external shipping calculator’s web service, for example, in the event of an outage. The fallback logic displays internal shipping methods (that you can specify either in the administration interface or with the Admin API) to all orders if a specified number of webhook calls to the external shipping calculator fail within a specified time span. This prevents errors at the shipping calculation step of order processing and allows orders to progress to the payment processing step.
During the initial configuration of your environment, Oracle sets certain settings that trigger the use of fallback shipping methods, including the number of consecutive failed webhook calls, the time span over which to count failed webhook calls, and the time period after which Commerce Cloud should try calling the shipping calculator’s service again.
Commerce Cloud uses the fallback logic to calculate shipping only when calls to the external shipping calculator fail. That is, when the external shipping calculator’s web service responds to a call with a 500-level status code. Fallback shipping calculation is not used when any other type of response is received.
The shippingMethod property on Commerce Cloud order objects specifies the shipping method selected by the shopper when they created the order. This property is also included in the data Commerce Cloud sends in the Order Submit webhook. You can use this information to identify orders submitted with a fallback shipping method so you can decide how to handle them in your order management system.
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