Summary: The Merchant App will not sign in, times out, or shows errors like 502 Bad Gateway or "exception communicating with merchant." When it hits every station at once, it is usually a short server outage that our team fixes. Here is how to check the scope and recover.

Problem

You tried to sign in to the Merchant App or process a shipment and it hangs, spins, or times out. Sometimes every station stops at the same time and printing stops everywhere. You may see one of these messages:

502 Bad Gateway

Timeout getting a response from Merchant

exception communicating with merchant

Error registering with Merchant server: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

Cause

The merchant service (the background service the Merchant App talks to) or the website hosting is down for a short time. When it affects everyone at once, it is a server outage on our side. We are alerted and restart the service, and it is usually back in about 5 to 15 minutes. If only one station is affected and nothing changed on your network, it is usually a stuck local session, not an outage.

How to check: if every station goes down at the same time, treat it as a server outage. If only one station is affected right after a network or security change, it is a local or network problem (see the ports-blocked article).

Fix

  1. Check how many stations are affected. If they are all down at once, it is a server outage.
  2. Email support@shipstore.com. Include the exact error you see, whether one or all stations are affected, and your company name.
  3. Close the Merchant App on each affected station. If it will not close, end it in Windows Task Manager. You do not need to reboot.
  4. Wait about 5 to 10 minutes. Short outages often clear on their own within about 15 minutes.
  5. Once the site loads again, do a hard browser refresh (press Ctrl+Shift+R) so the station loads the latest version.
  6. Have each user fully log out of the Merchant App and Shipstore, then log back in to the Merchant App first, then Shipstore.
  7. Process one test shipment from a single station before you put all stations back to work.
  8. If it is still down after about 15 minutes, or only one station is affected after a network change, email support@shipstore.com.

What you should see

Stations sign in to the Merchant App without spinning or timing out, a test shipment processes, and the outage messages are gone.

Related articles

  • Host error while processing: message queue allocated to another job
  • Merchant App will not register: ports or IP blocked
  • How To: Restart the Merchant App