last hurdle need help with my first ecart project :)

ok just tidying up a few things on the website im building (wanna say first great help so far since this is my biggest project to date so great learning experience)....but just a few issues to go......

im trying to work my head around the logic of orders being over-written....if a customer places an order, then gets through to paypal, makes the payment...BUT doesnt go to the websites "success page" (which was where i was intending of clearing all the sessions associated with the latest order) - lets say the customer devices to use the back button of the browser instead. pressing it twice would get them back to the confirm.php page which means they will never get to see the success.php page which then means those pesky sessions dont get cleared...and then if they decide to place a new order their previous order gets over written. this is where my logic stops - how can i prevent this, as we have no control of how the customer uses their web browser we cant force them not to use the browser back button. any suggestions on handling this?

im using paypal standards. but i cant get the client to make a paypal express account as i think that would incur them additional costs per transaction.

any thoughts on what i could do?

when the customer gets to the paypal site, the order is not placed until they click the submit order button on the paypal side. If they use the browsers back button the order will never be placed with paypal.

they have to click the submit order button for paypal to begin processing the order and send them to the success page.


there really not much that can be done to prevent them from using the back button, but if they do, they wont process the order.

Jason sorry I didnt explain myself correctly. what I mean is what if the customer gets to paypal, then pays for the transaction once the payment has gone through, then they use the "browser back button" (rather then use the link on paypal to return to the website.

is there anything I can do on the confirm.php page just before the customer clicks on the confirm order button so that it clears any sessions before it goes to paypal site.

on the confirm page, look for a hidden form element named "return" and make sure the value is a full URL to the checkout success page

<input type="hidden" name="return" id="return" value="http://www.mydomain.com/checkout_sucess.php" />

Jason, I did that originally and it works (but only works IF a customer clicks on the link in paypal after making a payment) my point is IF the customer (after making payment) doesnt click on the link and just uses the browser "back" button to get them back to the website...this means the customer will never see the "success" page.

Im wondering another work around would be to delete the "update" behaviours for the order summary/detail on the confirm page and just turn them into "Inserts" instead...at least then a new record would be inserted for orders rather then previous being updated....how come there is only an "update" server behaviour for orders in ecart - what was the reason for not developing an "insert" as well for this feature?

Chris

We made the server behavior update instead of insert to cover the case where people go to paypal, notice something is missing or wrong and then click back to go back to the web site and make a correction and then check out.

This seemed to be a lot more common than someone going through the whole process and clicking back to return to the site rather than clicking finish and then processing a second transaction.

I'd still recommend express checkout to avoid these issues entirely, but if you want to force an insert every time you just have to clear the OrderID session variable on the page that stores the cart. It identifies whether to insert or update based on the stored order session variable. If that is cleared on top of the page it will always insert.

Hi Ray. Thanks for that to be honest I do see the logic for the update behaviour and that does make sense. I know usually a customer wouldn't use a browser back button but I just wanted to have it fool prove (hence why I test my own sites lol) ;-)

I'm still hazey on the PayPal express implementation. I don't want to rerun the checkout wizard as a lot of custom code on that page. But I did notice PayPal express server behaviours in the ecart sub menu in the behaviours panel. In guessing that's used if you don't want to run any wizards. But if a client has a free PayPal
Account (I don't know as yet what type of PayPal client has only that I don't think they pay any charges for it - so isn't the PayPal express account for business users who pay monthly fees as when I researched the pricing structures were a little confusing especially when in different locations of the same PayPal website) they seem to duplicate information in different areas. If PayPal express is free without any monthly charges and don't have any % rate charges on a transaction then I would like to try that option but a little confused how to implement. And hoping that it wouldn't disrupt the flow of the pages I already created.