To reduce page load times and improve responsiveness of busy sites, many Magento or WooCommerce stores are equipped with one or more caching solutions. These may be built-in tools or third-party apps, plugins, or extensions that each work in slightly different ways.
By caching store and site content, you make it easier for that same content to be delivered to other browsers. While page and content caches do help a lot with ensuring speedy and reliable page delivery, they can also present some other challenges.
What the error means:
If you're getting a "cache duration exceeded" error, this means SKULabs has detected your store is sending heavily cached old order data. This can be detrimental to your fulfillment process, since SKULabs will be unable to see new orders for long periods of time while the result is cached.
How to resolve the error
Your system administrator must disable caching of Admin APIs, or at least reduce the cache duration to a significantly shorter duration (like 5 or 10 minutes instead of an hour or longer).
SKULabs throws errors when PUT/POST requests have any caching and when GET requests have more than 3599 seconds of caching.
Where do you make the change?
There are many places that caching could be taking place, including but not limited to the following:
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, or Cloudflare
Server configurations files for Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or perhaps
.htaccessfiles in your server rootReverse proxies such as Nginx, Squid, or Varnish
Caching plugins such as WP-Rocket, W3 Total Cache Minify, Cloudways FPC, Turpentine, Phoenix PageCache, etc.
Your hosting provider may have its own caching, especially in shared hosting environments. e.g. SiteGround Optimizer, Bluehost Performance Caching, GoDaddy WP Cache
Who is responsible for making this change?
This is strictly an ecommerce store configuration issue managed by your systems administrator / developer.
The original error message may contain additional details that can help track down where the cache configuration change should be made. However, SKULabs support will be unable to directly assist with this type of issue since it is an e-commerce software configuration issue.
We recommend all teams have contractors or staff familiar enough with the configuration of their store to ensure their API remains available and correctly configured.
If it is not possible to maintain the store configuration on your own, platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce offer a compelling advantage in not requiring this type of knowledge or maintenance on your end.
Related resources
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-clear-your-cache-in-wordpress/
https://www.godaddy.com/help/disable-wpcache-for-wordpress-19513
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/sg-optimizer/supercacher/
https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/wordpress-how-to-use-our-page-caching-feature
Cloudflare "bypass" for wc-api example
