Orders suddenly "getting lost" between Paypal & Zen

[artjewl]

The website in question has been working fine for years. Now, for no apparent reason, orders are getting lost. Fortunately, it's a low traffic store, so not too many orders have been lost yet. BUT the bad news is (1) the debugger isn't logging any errors, and (2) this has been a quiet problem for a whole week now!

Here's what's happening.

1. Customer places an order & is sent to Paypal to make payment.
2. Payment processes; customer receives a receipt; merchant receives notice of a payment made BUT it does not include order details!
3. NO RECORD of the order shows up in zen cart.

Like I said, no "error" is being logged by the debug utility. (Of course, there's always a chance I did something wrong THERE.)

Has Paypal made any recent changes I should be aware of? I really seems as though the information is getting lost between Paypal on the way back to zen...

I have not made any changes recently to the merchant account settings or anything along those lines. The closest I've come was to trying to change link text definitions in an inactive template's english.php (which inexplicably disrupted the form processing when that template was made active). But even that was put back together.

Any & ALL help is appreciated!

[DrByte]

Lemme guess ... you're using an older version of Zen Cart AND you're using the antiquated PayPal Website Payments Standard (aka PayPal IPN) module, and something's happened in the communications channel between PayPal's server and *your* server, and now the order notifications from PayPal to tell your store about new orders is suddenly broken. Happens all the time. Use Express Checkout instead and you won't fall victim to a firewall/server/communications glitch such as that.

[artjewl]

Thank you. :)

Since I inherited this site, I'll be honest, I hadn't gotten into the merchant cart end of things much at all yet, so I really had no idea between the different PayPal carts. That said, sorry for posting this in apparently the wrong forum in the first place.

Thanks again for the direction. Wish me luck.