PayPal Payment Results in Successful Checkout But No Products Paid For, Only the Shipping is Paid For. Help!

Dear WebAssist,

For the last several weeks I have had a few customers who made a successful payment on my website but the customer never actually paid for any item(s). The only money they were charged was my base shipping rate of $8.50. In all the customer cases where this had happened, it was from a payment made on PayPal and not from a credit card. I tried to debug this issue myself but to no avail. I even tried to recreate the bug, but when I made several live test payments on my website it did not result in any errors. I am going to need someone to help me figure this out once and for all because it has gotten me scratching my head for a few days now. I have attached the FTP credentials below privately for you all to inspect.

Thank you,
Robert Crespo

The only thing that I can think of is that they may have stayed on the paypal site for more than 20 minutes and their session timed out and their cart was cleared.

I've updated your pp_confirm.php page so it will redirect them back to the empty cart in this case and not process the payment with just the shipping. The code I added is on lines 56-61.

Ray, thank you for the help in helping me diagnose this thorny issue. It could very well be like you think, that the issue has to do with an expired session. However, I just tried another test payment on PayPal but the payment failed. I had this issue come up before a few weeks ago and it was resolved when I removed the code below.

I don't see how that code could effect the payment status. I think it must have been something else causing the failure.

If you get it back to the point where it fails and let me know how to reproduce it then I can reproduce the error and debug it.

Ray,

OK, I found out why the PayPal payment is failing. I kept your code fix to prevent orders from processing on an expired session. The reason why the payments are failing has to so with multiple items in the shopping cart. In 5 recent payment tests, all the payments worked for single item purchases and all the payments failed for multiple items purchases. In other words, a successful PayPal payment is only possible if one item is purchased. Put 2, 3, or more items in the shopping cart and the checkout fails. This is the issue. So, is this a fixable problem? I certainly hope so.

Most likely it is something about one of the items (a character in the name it doesn't like), not the fact that it is multiple items.

Ray, do you think is might have something to do with a quotation mark? I have quotation marks like "name of the plant" and em dashes like as, Venus flytrap - variety name. Could this be causing the error?

OK, I just removed quotation marks from the name of a product and the payment still failed. The funny thing is, the payment works fine for credit cards and multiple purchases. I am kind of stumped but I think the answer lies somewhere on he pp_confirm.php page.

Ray, is this is the case then I do not know why miltiple item purchases work fine for regular credit payments. It's totally bizarre that the PayPal payment works fine for a single item and it fails when multiple items are in the shopping cart. Help! : (

What products did you add? I think if you added just one product and it was the one that causes the failure, then it would fail. I can test it, but I don't want to keep trying different products to reproduce it and then you would have to refund a bunch of orders. Please narrow down the product that causes the failure and tell me the steps to reproduce and I'll get it working.

Ray, I just tried another two products to purchase and the transaction failed. I then got rid of one product and the transaction worked. At this point, I have tried dozens of different product combinations and they have all failed. The only thing that works is a single product purchase on PayPal.