Weird PayPal issue

I have had an especially busy week but I’ve never seen this happen before. (Unless there are others who haven’t noticed yet!)



From the customer:

[QUOTE]I had difficulty putting this order through via paypal (saying i already made this purchase which i hadn’t) and OLD stuff i had previously purchased kept popping up in my cart and I had to physically remove it. [/QUOTE]



I sell ebooks. She was first complaining that a product was not as advertised. After further investigation, I am showing she HAD made a purchase, and it was paid for with MasterCard. In her email was the order confirmation she’d received for an order paid for with PayPal. It had the SAME ORDER NUMBER, however, the items were different and it was paid for with PayPal! I have no record of this on the cs-cart side. I only have the order confirmation email AND a successful payment at PayPal. The two orders were placed about 45 minutes apart.



What do you think happened?

Okay, scratch that… The PayPal order was placed FIRST. She was sent an order confirmation email and download links, however, the order was not recorded in the store and apparently her cart was not emptied. She returned to the store to place another order and had to empty the cart before she could do so.

Ogia, was this a Paypal Standard transaction or Paypal Express?

[quote name=‘Struck’]Ogia, was this a Paypal Standard transaction or Paypal Express?[/QUOTE]

PayPal Standard

I had a feeling it was Paypal Standard (aka: You must click this link to return to the sellers site to complete this transaction…), and this is just one more reason why I despise Standard & love Paypal Express!



My guess is that particular customer did not return to your site as instructed which is why the cart contents were never emptied.



I could be wrong of course considering I have not checked out Paypal Standard recently (nor will I most likely ever again). :smiley:



These types of situations with Paypal standard used to waste alot of our valuable time, no longer!

Actually, I think it does return now. However, if I remember correctly, it takes a moment… I don’t know. Maybe she interrupted the process. I’ll have to test it again to see what happens.



PayPal Express didn’t work for me because customers could bypass creating an account. I require account creation because their downloads are stored in their account.

[QUOTE] I require account creation because their downloads are stored in their account.[/QUOTE]



Ogia, I can understand your dilemna, although, now you really have me thinking because we also, do not allow “Guest Checkout” and have used Paypal Express since about the time of it’s creation.



I can’t remember off the top of my head if I had to do anything special to deal with this issue, however, I just quickly looked over approx. 150 orders and of course found several paid thru Express, and don’t see any of these that appear to be from unregistered users! ??



We do allow the option for customers to “Create an Account” after order completion, and also have “Checkout as Guest” disabled while rcvng several Paypal Express orders per day, so now I am baffled! :smiley:



I will try to look into this further when I get some time.

The other thing that sucks about Paypal Express is they must have a Paypal account and can’t just pay by credit card if they so choose. This is the main reason I use Paypal Standard.

[QUOTE]The other thing that sucks about Paypal Express is they must have a Paypal account and can’t just pay by credit card if they so choose. This is the main reason I use Paypal Standard.[/QUOTE]



I hear you, for whatever reasons, this has never been an issue for our business, our customers are mainly b2b of which the majority turn out to be long term repeat customers. I would be surprised if we have heard more than two customers question the reason for having a Paypal account since we switched to Express, and although it is certainly possible we could have lost a few, they were most likely low dollar consumer purchases of which we would not consider to be of much importance (especially if we had to spend a half hour searching thru paypal records to locate their missing order details). Like many other details, alot will depend upon your own individual business needs.



However, simply eliminating the wasted administrative time in dealing with orders processed thru Paypal Standard was a Godsend to us! :wink:





And, BTW, Metallica still rules!

[quote name=‘Struck’]However, simply eliminating the wasted administrative time in dealing with orders processed thru Paypal Standard was a Godsend to us! ;)[/QUOTE]



Can you explain this a little further? What do you mean “wasted administrative time”? Doing what exactly?

[quote name=‘The Tool’]Can you explain this a little further? What do you mean “wasted administrative time”? Doing what exactly?[/QUOTE]



Sure, does this sound somewhat familiar to you Tool?:



“Hello, I placed an order on your site about two months ago, and I never received this order, I really need to know if you are ever going to ship this order out to me?”



(Our Response) "Hello Mr. Customer, we ship orders same day they are placed, are you certain you actually placed your order with us? What was you order number, who was it ordered under? That is very abnormal, however, we have no record of any order coming from you, and rest assurred we don’t loose orders!



How did you pay? (Customer Response) Paypal

Ok, we will need to scour through page after page of Paypal payment records & see if we can find this! Ok, we found it, no doubt you neglected to click that stupid link that says “Return to sellers store to complete your transaction” didn’t you?



Whatever, we will ship your order out today then, sorry for this rediculous mishap!



Get off the phone with the customer & start screaming profanity because we just wasted 30 minutes of our valuable time tracking down details of a $25.00 bubblegum order paid thru Paypal Standard. :evil:



Oh how I miss the good ole days prior to Paypal Express payments! :stuck_out_tongue:



Btw: We have never gone through this embarrassing situation again after switching to Express Payments!

She did get her download links and order confirmation even though I had no record of it. Thankfully she had replied to the order confirmation email so I could see all the details.



I just tested the PayPal functionality to confirm. This is how it’s always worked since I started using cs-cart so I’ve never had any issues like you describe.


  1. selected PayPal as payment method
  2. redirected to PayPal
  3. made payment
  4. PayPal confirmation page has link to return to store



    The order is created on the cs-cart side even if customer does not click link to return to store.

Hi Ogia,



I sorta insinuated that it has been quite some time ago since I have tried Paypal Standard, the more I think about it, I bet it has been 4-5 years ago when we made the switch to Express Payments (time does fly when you are having fun), and at that time the “we have no records of your order being placed, aka” the lost order syndrome was a widely known, very common occurance for merchants using Paypal Standard. I would not be surprised if Paypal has made some improvemements in communicating back to the store as well as CS-Cart also making changes related to all Paypal payment methods.



Also, Paypal wants to continue to be the king of payment processing so as you know they are coming out with a more modernized revamped version of standard payments in the very near future. Hopefully they will continue to improve it to the point where there no longer is even a need to choose between Standard or Express, sorta primitive thinking to even have the need to offer two methods, lock into one version, & create it to handle everything, & handle it well.

[quote name=‘Struck’]Sure, does this sound somewhat familiar to you Tool?:



“Hello, I placed an order on your site about two months ago, and I never received this order, I really need to know if you are ever going to ship this order out to me?”



(Our Response) "Hello Mr. Customer, we ship orders same day they are placed, are you certain you actually placed your order with us? What was you order number, who was it ordered under? That is very abnormal, however, we have no record of any order coming from you, and rest assurred we don’t loose orders!



How did you pay? (Customer Response) Paypal

Ok, we will need to scour through page after page of Paypal payment records & see if we can find this! Ok, we found it, no doubt you neglected to click that stupid link that says “Return to sellers store to complete your transaction” didn’t you?



Whatever, we will ship your order out today then, sorry for this rediculous mishap!



Get off the phone with the customer & start screaming profanity because we just wasted 30 minutes of our valuable time tracking down details of a $25.00 bubblegum order paid thru Paypal Standard. :evil:



Oh how I miss the good ole days prior to Paypal Express payments! :stuck_out_tongue:



Btw: We have never gone through this embarrassing situation again after switching to Express Payments![/QUOTE]



No, I have never experienced that at all and all I use is Standard. This is why I am asking.



Even though they do not come back to the cart the status is still changed to “Processed” and the notifications still go to the proper sources. As a matter of fact, I just deleted 1034 carts from users carts so that should tell you that most do not come back to the site after PayPal.

[quote]

My guess is that particular customer did not return to your site as instructed which is why the cart contents were never emptied.

[/quote]

Not true. If they do not return to the store, the order is in the Open status (O) and the cart contents have already been emptied.

[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]Not true. If they do not return to the store, the order is in the Open status (O) and the cart contents have already been emptied.[/QUOTE]



Not entirely true. If the customer does not return the status is still changed to “Processed” but the cart contents remain.

[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]Not true. If they do not return to the store, the order is in the Open status (O) and the cart contents have already been emptied.[/QUOTE]



Actually, it doesn’t matter if they return to the store as long as they complete the payment at PayPal. Prior to 2.1.x (?) an order was “open” if they went to PayPal but then did not complete payment. In 2.1.3 it is an “incomplete” order. In 2.1.3, the only open orders I ever see are when a customer uses an eCheck at PayPal.



That’s why I’m confused about what happened. She completed the payment at PayPal and the store sent her a confirmation email and assigned an order number. She said she came back to the store and the cart was not empty. She removed the products, and placed another order. The store gave her the same order number and that is the only order I can see on the cs-cart side.

If they return, the order will move from Open to Processed.

It sounds like we all have experience with different versions of the PayPal addon. :wink:



I moved to cs-cart when version 2.0.7 was current (2009). This is the first time I’ve had a problem with my store not showing an order for a payment that was made at PayPal. Since I’ve been using it, the success of the addon never depended upon whether or not the customer returned to the store.



Something else is going on with this particular transaction. I guess I will just blame the user. :slight_smile:

Find the date/time the order was placed.

Check your php error_log file and try to correlate any php error that might have occurred at that time. Other possiblility is that your inbound network went down right after she placed the order with paypal. so PP couldn’t respond. But that one’s a long shot since the order is created BEFORE any payment transaction occurs.



Can always blame the gremlins…