Payment Received Without Order

[noderaser]

I got an attempted order today (second in a month) where I receive a payment from PayPal where everything looks like it's coming from ZenCart, but for which I do not get an order through ZenCart. I am currently using PayPal Website Payments Standard/IPN and ZenCart 1.3.9f, though the last order where I had this problem was on 1.3.9d.

From talking to the first customer, it sounds like they bailed out after getting payment confirmation from the PayPal site, but they could not be terribly specific as to how their checkout process went. It sounds like they did not get redirected back to the order confirmation page; whether this was due to a website or PayPal error or just impatience (bailing out at PayPal) I can't say for certain. Have not had a conversation with the current customer to see what's happened on his end yet.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening? It sounds like orders aren't "saved" until payment confirmation comes; is there any way to set ZenCart to save the order before being sent to the payment site? Are my customers just "special"?

[noderaser]

What does the "zenid" in the "Custom" field of the PayPal details page signify?

[DrByte]

That's the Zen Cart zenid (session id) that the customer was using when they made their purchase.

[DrByte]

You're using Website Payments Standard which relies completely on waiting for PayPal's server to tell *your* server about the customer's order ... during the 3-5 seconds it takes for the customer to return to your site. If *anything* goes wrong (and LOTS can) in that communication, your store will not have record of the order.

If you use Express Checkout instead, then your store does not have to wait for that background notification, since it happens in real-time immediately as the customer sees the checkout-success screen on your site.
Save yourself all the headaches and click "Remove" on your Website Payments Standard module, and click "Install" on your Express Checkout module.
Configuration instructions here: www.zen-cart.com/getpaypal

[noderaser]

Ok, I have disabled Website Payments Standard and installed Express Checkout. Will see how it goes.

[noderaser]

One thing I noticed about Express Checkout vs. Web Payments, is that the payment notification now goes to the PayPal account address, instead of the store address. Is there any way to have the payment notification go to the store address, like it did with Web Payments Standard? It's helpful during order processing to see the payment right there.

[DrByte]

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

[noderaser]

With the "Website Payments Standard" module, notification of the payment received from PayPal would go to the same address as the order notification from ZenCart ([email protected])

With the "Express Checkout" module, notification of the payment received from PayPal goes to the email address of the account (my personal email). Order notification from ZenCart still goes to [email protected].

[DrByte]

I'm guessing that with WPS you had ([email protected]) as a secondary email address in your PP account, instead of being the primary address?

[noderaser]

Yes, the store address was and still is a secondary address... I'm guessing that Express Checkout doesn't use an email address at all to track the payment destination, and instead uses only the API signature? I guess the only way to get notifications to go back to the store address would be to set it as the primary address in PayPal, as the "Notifications" page only lists whether a notification is sent for various activities--not where it is sent to.

I guess this really wouldn't adversely affect how I process orders; I would have to go into the ZenCart admin and extract the info from the orders page. In the past, I've gotten most of the info through the email notifications, and only used the orders page to update the order status with shipping/tracking information.