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What should I do when something goes wrong?
What should I do when something goes wrong?

If you see errors, or BROKEN exhibits, or something seems wrong

Jeff Schnitzer avatar
Written by Jeff Schnitzer
Updated over a week ago

OrbitKit Fulfillment

Our integrations with Shopify and Etsy use well-defined, supported APIs and is incredibly reliable. You will rarely see errors publishing to OrbitKit Fulfillment platforms.

OrbitKit Plus

The print-on-demand platforms serviced by OrbitKit Plus do not have public APIs. We use a variety of automation techniques to publish your designs, none of which are precise and transactional the way we expect computers to operate. There are countless things that can go wrong:

  • POD platforms make breaking changes to their systems

  • POD platforms introduce bugs in their systems

  • Credentials can become invalid

  • Networks can fail or be interrupted

  • We even occasionally have bugs of our own!

The good news is that OrbitKit is built with this in mind, and takes precautions:

  • Transient errors are detected and retried on a schedule (usually every 8-12 hours).

  • On retries, OrbitKit automatically picks up where it left off in the publishing process.

The consequence of this is that OrbitKit almost always succeeds in publishing, but in a small number of cases it will take a few attempts. You might notice this on your dashboard:

Exhibits that are PUBLISHING either haven't been tried yet or are still retrying. Exhibits that are BROKEN, OrbitKit has given up on - either because of "too many retries", or because we detected a condition that we do not expect to resolve by itself (eg, authentication failure).

What can I do?

The first step is usually to check the suspect exhibits for errors. Click on the # in the statistics box to find see the Exhibits page filtered down to those exhibits. For example, clicking on the 1 at the intersection of Shopify and BROKEN will show you all the broken Shopify exhibits.

You can see the error messages abbreviated on the listing page, or you can click on a specific exhibit (eg, EXH23456) and get the exhibit details:

This exhibit was broken because the image isn't high enough resolution. OrbitKit will downscale artwork for platforms that cannot handle large files, but we can't upscale artwork!

Sometimes (like this case) broken exhibits are unfixable. But often they are - for example, if your credentials are invalid, you can fix your credentials for the venue. After the underlying issue is resolved, click the Unbreak button. Your exhibit will be put back in the queue for publishing.

You can unbreak many exhibits at once from the Exhibits page by selecting the relevant exhibits and using the Unbreak action:

Help!

Still have questions? Just reach out with the little chat icon - we are always happy to help, and don't mind taking a deeper look for you.

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