Where's my order? How is payment completed?

[DarkMonohue]

First post here, still very wet behind the ears and may get a beating for asking this, but how exactly is payment "completed"?

I rec'd my first order today (using 1.3.8a and Website Payments Standard). Got a payment notification from PayPal, but cannot find any trace of the order anywhere in admin. The payment req'd me to accept it at PayPal, which I did, but I cannot find any record of the order anywhere in Zen Cart. Even bringing up the customers->customers list and clicking the buyer's name shows no orders. And yet, I have his money.

Totally at a loss here, and totally green.

[DarkMonohue]

Update: after snooping around I found two issues that helped.

First, in Email manager, setting "Emails must send from known domain?" to NO allowed me to receive email sent from my contact form.

Second, in Payment Module, there was no data token. I got that from my PayPal account and plugged it in.

Result: The first order rec'd prior to making these changes still shows no record. A second order rec'd today showed only a payment notification. The customer reported "Sent and paid.. not sure if it worked though.... I got the payment confirmation but paypal did not redirect properly back to you or something." Shortly afterward, he sent a note saying, "got it working now.. just logged back in and put the link that paypal had on the redirect back to you in there and it says I have order 1 now =]"

I now have an order notification in my mailbox and the second customer's order shows up in admin. So AFAIK everything is working as designed.

[DarkMonohue]

Still having trouble. People are making payments but the redirect isn't working. In each case I've had to manually accept the payment due to an unconfirmed shipping address. I have since changed my preferences in PayPal to accept payments even with an unconfirmed shipping address. I don't know whether that will do the trick or not, but fingers are crossed.

[DrByte]

You wouldn't have these PayPal problems if you used Express Checkout.

Website Payments Standard relies COMPLETELY on PayPal's servers sending *your* server the order completion notice. If *anything* goes wrong in that process (and it often does, due to circumstances outside the control of Zen Cart), then your orders won't show in your store and you won't get order notifications, etc etc etc.
Using Express Checkout is smarter because it completes orders immediately, and isn't dependent on that background process.

[DarkMonohue]

Thanks for the reply and the guidance.

Unless I am missing something, Express Checkout is part of the 1.3.9 release, right? I've downloaded that, but it looks like an absolute nightmare to set up. I'm no developer or programmer, and reading through the instructions, I'm having a hard time understanding it. Looks like hours of banging my head against the wall and likely wrecking something. I'll try it this weekend, and hopefully not burn the site to the ground in the process. There may be a few moments.

How often do those updates come out? Am I going to have to totally restructure my store every time someone discovers something new? I didn't have the thing running for a week before 1.3.9 dropped and became an OMG you have to do this right now priority...I'm a little frustrated, and really hoping this (the store) will be a fairly maintenance free experience once set up to my liking.

[DrByte]

PayPal Express Checkout has existed within Zen Cart since v1.3.7
Improvements have been made to it and other parts with each new release.

As far as upgrades go, it's up to you when/whether you upgrade. But if you're running into particular problems it's always best to use the latest version if you want quick support. If you wish to do strictly self-serve support then you're welcome to use as old a version as you want, and coddle it along as needed.

[DarkMonohue]

Ha! I'd overlooked it entirely. Not sure why I couldn't find it last night. Thanks for clarifying that.

Enabling Express checkout now. I will also go ahead with the update later on, just on principal.