Checkout skipping Step 1 - Delivery Address

[ronlee67]

My very stable Zencart 3.1.8.a has begun skipping Step 1 of checkout. This occurs on about 20% of my orders. The result is that the customer has no means to submit a delivery address and the delivery address is not defaulted to be the same as the billing address.

I have been unable to identify any common thread to these problem orders such as a common payment module, delivery zone, etc.

There are no entries for the delivery address in the database records for the affected orders. This includes the delivery_address_format which defaults to 0.
All other entries (customer name, billing address, etc. are normal).

In troubleshooting, I entered a test order for an existing customer and another for a new customer. The results were the same either way:
1. Added items to shopping cart.
2. Single-clicked on "Go to Checkout"
3. Instead of displaying "Step 1 of 3 - Delivery Information" ZC went straight to "Step 2 of 3 - Billing Information".
4. I was able to continue to complete the checkout procedure with no indication to customer that there is a problem. The Delivery address is simply not displayed during checkout and of course is not available in admin.

Again, this only happens to about 1 in 5 orders.
I have verified that the address format for my country (United States) is set to 2 in admin-> locations/Taxes-> Countries.

Need help troublshooting this.
Thanks,
Ron

[Kim]

Do the products being ordered at the time have any commonality, like being virtual instead of physical?

[ronlee67]

Do the products being ordered at the time have any commonality, like being virtual instead of physical?

Hi Kim .. thanks for the response.

All products on our site are phsyical and in the Product - General group.

With your nudging, I checked to see if the problem only occurred within a specific category of products and discovered that all defective orders were for the same exact product.

A quick review of that product revealed that ""Product is "Virtual" was selected. That selection must have been "bumped" while doing other edits as we have been selling that product for a very long time with no problems.

Thank you so much for the lead! You are awesome!

Ron

[Kim]

No problem ... That was a logical place to start the diagnosis.