Intermittent Error

Hi Ray, I have a problem that pops up every so often with saving orders to the db, it's happened twice this week.(over a few hundred sales)

There are two types of failure.

1.The user will be directed to PayPal then back to our site to confirm the sale, the sale is completed and funds credited to our PayPal account, however no record is saved in our db.
2.The user uses their credit card on our site, the transaction is completed and funds credited to our PayPal account, however only partial details are captured, the sales lines are saved but no customer data.

I use jsvalidate to confirm the info on the checkout page, to keep our stock levels accurate as soon as an item is placed in the cart, an order is generated with the session id, so in our case our database will accept null values in all the summary fields except for the session id field.

Both methods use the same save order code by using an include to another file with the eCart store summary and details.

Wondering if you've come across this or have any ideas

Cheers
Norman

I haven't seen that. We use paypal for our store and haven't had an issue like that.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with the way your checkout code is structured. If you want to attach your checkout code to a reply I can see if something stands out. Otherwise the best thing to do is to try to figure out what the failures have in common. It is really hard to track and fix a problem you can't reproduce, but once you can reproduce it I'm sure I can help you get it fixed.

You may want to create a debug table in your database and start dumping information about each sale. Insert the session id and date and time as well as the entire contents of the session and post and then when the next failure happens you can take a look and see if you can spot an anomaly or similarity. The first step to fixing any problem is understanding the cause. Something has to be causing it.

Thanks Ray,

I'll start working on it, we had just under 50 sales today and one had no customer details.
I've added a screen shot of one transaction.

Thanks again for your help

Odd... can I see a copy of the confirm.php page? It looks like the information wasn't even sent to paypal, so that explains why it wouldn't be in your database. Somehow they are able to get through the server validation and not provide customer information. I'd have to look at the page to see how.

Other times the information is in PayPal but not in our database as well.

This is the busiest week of the year for us so I'll try and sort it out on the weekend and get back to you.

Cheers
Norman

Hi Ray, just getting some time to look for a few niggly errors, I had a failure using PayPal express to save to the db the other day, all the info was saved at PayPal however no order at our end.

The one thing I noticed, this customer had loads of information, it was a hospital so it floors wards, reception, doctors name c/o departments and on it went.

Just wondering if it was the amount of data to be saved? I would have though it would have been truncated it it was too long.

I have to keep the address fields to around 40 chr's to allow for uploading data to Australia Post.

What are the default character lengths for the PayPal site check out?

Cheers
Norman

If it passed paypal then it should just be truncated if it was a data length issue with your database. I doubt that was the problem. That theory would make sense if it failed paypal checkout as well, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Maybe your best option is to start logging the information returned from paypal on the pp_confirm.php page. We could store the returned information in .txt files associated with the order timestamp so that if one ever failed we could look up the result. You could manually clear out the folder monthly when there are no issues, but have a log if you ever have an issue. That would give us something concrete to go on.

Do you know if they got a success or failure page on your site?

Hi Ray,

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll work on it. I do log all failures from the failure page so I'll go have a look and see if I can match the timestamp to the PayPal transaction

Cheers

I would log it on the pp_confirm page after the transaction is processed and before the save in database. That would catch the problem if it was redirecting to either the success or failure page.