After a customer submits an aggregated review form (What is an Aggregated Review Form?), the form attempts to post reviews to WooCommerce. If transmission of reviews to WooCommerce fails, the store owner will receive an automatic notification to the email address specified in Email for Notifications field on Review Reminder tab of the plugin's settings. The notification will include all available information about the error.


Here we outline steps to resolve the posting errors.


Step 1 : Try to post the review again

It is possible that posting of a review failed due to a temporary error. For example, your site was temporary offline (no hosting provider guarantees 100% uptime) or there was some other issue. Therefore, the 1st step is to try to post the review again.


To do that, go to your account at cusrev.com and navigate to Reviews page. There, you will see a list of reviews.  In the list of reviews, you will need to find the review with the posting error. After you found it, click on the WooCommerce button as shown on the screenshot below.



The system will try to post the review to WooCommerce again. If the review is posted successfully, it will mean that the problem was indeed temporary. If you get a posting error again, then the system will provide additional information about the error. To view the additional information, click on the Posting error link as shown below:



Now, you should use this additional information about the error to determine what is its root cause and apply one of the solutions suggested in the Step 2 below.


If you don't have an account for cusrev.com yet, it is easy to create one. After you have an account, it will be possible to get a Free license key and use it to link your store's reviews to the new account. Please refer to this article for detailed steps: How to Get a License Key.



Step 2 : Analyze the error

The first thing that you should check is the error code (e.g., 400, 401, 500, etc). The error code is display in the additional information about the error (see the Step 1 above).


Error: timeout of 60000ms exceeded

If you received the error "timeout of 60000ms exceeded", it means that your website did not respond to the incoming connection from the review form after 60 seconds. This error could happen when a website is offline or when a hosting provider blocks incoming connections to the website. Based on our experience, it usually happens when a hosting provider blocks requests from the review forms. To resolve this error, please reach out to the support team of your hosting provider and ask them to whitelist the following IP address: 18.210.171.51.


Error: Unknown response from the server

If you received the error "Unknown response from the server", it usually means that your website is protected by a Web Application Firewall (WAF) of some kind that blocks the incoming connection from the review form. Based on our experience, it often happens when a hosting provider uses specialized firewall software to block connections from bots. They often classify an attempt of the review form to transmit a review to your website as a bot (not a human visitor) and block it. To resolve this error, please reach out to the support team of your hosting provider and ask them to whitelist the following IP address: 18.210.171.51.


Errors 401, 403

If you received error codes 401 or 403, it means that something blocks REST API in WordPress on your site. It could be a security plugin, a password-protection plugin or a custom code snippet in functions.php that disables REST API.

Please check plugins installed on your WordPress site that might potentially restrict REST API. If there is any plugin blocking REST API, you should update its configuration to allow inbound REST API calls that transmit customer reviews from the aggregated review forms to your site. Depending on the security plugin you use, there are different ways to do it. For example:

  • Completely disable blocking of REST API. It is usually the easiest solution but it will open not just REST API endpoints for our plugin but also the standard WordPress REST API endpoints and endpoints of other plugins you might have installed on your site.
  • Add the IP address of review forms to a whitelist in the settings of the security plugin. If the security plugin offers an option to add specific IP addresses to the whitelist, try adding the following IP address: 18.210.171.51. It is the IP address of review forms that sends customer reviews to your store.
  • Disable blocking of REST API for the endpoint of our plugin only. If the security plugin offers an option to block and unblock specific REST API endpoints, try unblocking the following endpoint: /ivole/. It is the endpoint of our plugin that is used to receive customer reviews.
  • Whitelist URL of the REST API endpoint. The URL will depend on the domain of your website and will look like this: {website domain}/wp-json/ivole/*

If you don't have any security plugins installed on your site, please also check the custom code that you might have in your theme's functions.php file. Any code that blocks REST API should be adjusted to allow either the IP address of review forms (see above) or REST API endpoint used by our plugin (also see above).


Examples of Security Plugins

Here are some examples of security plugins that can block REST API and block transmission of reviews. This list is by no means complete because new plugins are published every week.


Error 401 (cr_authentication_failed)

There is one more variant of the error 401 that requires a different solution. It can be easily identified by the code cr_authentication_failed displayed in the additional information about the error. Usually, this error happens after a website is restored from a backup, and custom fields in WooCommerce orders are erased or overwritten.


To resolve this error, it is necessary to update a custom field in the WooCommerce order corresponding to the review that couldn't not be posted.


1. Take the order ID from the Reviews page on cusrev.com.

2. Open the order details in WooCommerce and scroll down to the Custom Fields section. If you cannot see the Custom Fields section, make sure that it is enabled in Screen Options (top right corner).

3. Check if the Custom Fields section includes a custom field with a name ivole_secret_key.

4. If such a custom fields already exists, set its Value to be equal to the key from the error message (no need to copy double quotes) and save the order.

5. If such a custom field does not exist yet, add it and set its Value to be equal to the key from the error message (no need to copy double quotes). Save the order.

6. Re-post the reviews that failed (see the Step 3 below).


Error 401 (rest_not_logged_in)

Just another variant of the 401 error that could be caused by security plugins. There were reports that "WP Hardening" plugin caused this error. In order to resolve this error, please check settings of the security plugin and make sure that it doesn't block WP REST API. For example, in case of "WP Hardening" plugin, it is necessary to uncheck "Disable WP API JSON" checkbox.


Error 500

After a customer submits their reviews via an aggregated review form, the form tries to transmit the reviews to your WooCommerce store. If there is an error during the transmission, the form will send a notification with information about the error to the email address that you specified in the settings of the plugin ('Review Reminder' tab, 'Email for Notifications' field).


One of the errors that might occur during the transmission is 'Error: Request failed with status code 500'. Here are the steps for troubleshooting this problem.


1. Temporarily enable debugging in WordPress. Here is an article that explains how to do it: https://wordpress.org/support/article/debugging-in-wordpress/. In brief, below are the settings that need to be added to your wp-config.php file. Before making any changes to the wp-config.php file, please make sure to create a backup copy of this file.


define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 0 );
PHP


2. After debugging is enabled, it is necessary to reproduce the error. To do this, create a small order in WooCommerce (for yourself) and send yourself an invitation to review the order (How to Manually Send Review Reminders). Leave a test review and submit the form.


3. Go to WooCommerce and confirm that the review you have just submitted is not there.


4. Download and review the debug log (you will need to locate it on your website server using FTP access) to see if there are any errors.


5. Contact us (create a ticket on this support portal) and let us know what errors you found in the debug log.


6. Disable debugging in WordPress.


Error 403 or 503 (Cloudflare)

If you're using Cloudflare, there's a possibility that they are blocking the review forms from sending any data to your website. Please add the IP address 18.210.171.51 to your Cloudflare Allowlist using their IP Access Rule.


To create an IP Access Rule, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your Cloudflare account.
  2. Select your domain.
  3. Click the Security dropdown.
  4. Click the WAF option
  5. Click on the Tools tab.
  6. Under IP Access Rules, enter the following details:
  7. Enter the IP 18.210.171.51 ) under the "Value" field
  8. Select "Allow" as your Action.
  9. Select whether the rule applies toThis website or All websites in the account.
  10. (Optional) add a Note (i.e. Customer Reviews).
  11. Click Add.

Step 3 : Re-post the reviews

After you fixed the problem with transmission of reviews to WooCommerce, it is time to re-send the reviews that failed. To do this, go to your account at cusrev.com and navigate to Reviews page. There, you will see a list of reviews. If a review could not be successfully posted to WooCommerce from the first time, you will be able to re-send it using the WooCommerce button as shown on the screenshot below.