Troubleshooting

Most problems fall into one of the categories below. Start with the collection log — it records exactly what happened.

Reading the collection log

Open the store, go to Collection history, and click Log on the most recent run. You get every URL requested, the status code returned, how long Vantage waited, and how many times it retried.

No new reviews are being collected

What the log says	What it means	What to do
`robots.txt disallows …`	The site now forbids reading that page	Nothing to fix — this is Vantage behaving correctly. Switch the store to CSV import.
`blocked`, status 403 / 429 / 503	The site is rate-limiting or blocking your server	Raise the delay in Settings. Wait two hours for the automatic cooldown. Consider a proxy if it persists.
`blocked` with status 200	A captcha page — Vantage detected it despite the "success" status	Same as above.
`…layout may have changed`	The review site changed its page structure	Needs a product update. See below.
`circuit open`	Vantage is deliberately backing off after repeated blocks	Wait. It resumes automatically after two hours.
`connection error`	Network or DNS problem	Check your server can reach the site: `curl -I https://www.amazon.com`
Pages fetched, 0 reviews, no warning	The product genuinely has no new reviews	Nothing to fix.

"The layout may have changed"

Review sites change their page structure without warning. This is the one problem you cannot fix from Settings — it needs an update to the product.

Meanwhile, you are not stuck. Export your reviews from the source and import them via CSV, and your reports keep running on schedule.

Nothing is running at all

If no collections, reports or alerts happen, cron is almost certainly not reaching the application.

# Is the schedule registered?
php artisan schedule:list

# Force a collection to prove the app itself works
php artisan vantage:scrape --store=1 --sync

If the manual command works but nothing runs on schedule, the problem is your cron entry. Check the path is absolute and that the user running cron can execute PHP.

Collections queue but never finish

Your queue worker is not running. Check with:

php artisan queue:work --once

If that processes a job, your worker process has died and needs a supervisor to keep it alive. See Installation.

Reports say "not enough reviews"

Fewer than five reviews landed in that period. Vantage declines to draw conclusions from a sample that small rather than producing something confident and wrong. If you know there are more reviews, check that your source has dates — CSV imports without a date column cannot be placed into a week.

AI analysis is not being used

Check, in order:

Settings → Test AI connection. If the key is rejected, that is your answer.
Your token cap. If it is reached, Vantage falls back to offline analysis by design. Usage is shown at the top of Settings.
The report's "How this report was produced" section. It names the engine that actually ran.
Your provider account balance. An empty account looks like an auth failure.

Falling back is intentional. If the AI provider fails mid-run — rate limit, outage, exhausted budget — Vantage finishes the job with the offline engine rather than failing. A report produced partly offline beats no report.

Emails are not arriving

Vantage uses standard Laravel mail configuration. Test it independently:

php artisan tinker
>>> Mail::raw('test', fn ($m) => $m->to('[email protected]')->subject('Vantage test'));

If that fails, the problem is your MAIL_* settings in .env, not Vantage.

Reaching the review limit

A Regular license allows 5,000 reviews per month across all stores. When reached, collection stops cleanly and records why — nothing is lost, and it resumes next month. An Extended license removes the limit.

Still stuck?

When contacting support, include:

The collection log from the failing run (the Log button)
Your PHP version: php -v
Output of php artisan schedule:list
Anything relevant from storage/logs/laravel.log