Why does it sometimes take 8 or more hours for an order to show up after the customer

[SPembleton]

One of my customers placed an order over 8 hours ago. I got notification from PayPal that she paid, but I can't determine WHAT she bought. It is not in my Admin site, I did not reeceive an email. Did she (or I ) do something wrong? It normally works fine.

[DrByte]

Lemme guess ... you're using "PayPal Website Payments Standard", aka IPN, right?

That module relies on PayPal's servers telling your server about the new order (in the background, by a completely separate remote process independent of the customer's presence), and if any little glitch happens in that process, your store will never see the order.
Or if the customer was asked to create a PayPal account at the end of the process and didn't make a choice to answer either yes or no, but simply closed the page or ignored it, then PayPal didn't send the notice to your store to tell it about the paid order. Thus no order exists in your store.

That's why it's far smarter and more reliable to use the PayPal Express Checkout module instead, since it does immediate completion of the order while the customer is on your site.

[jeking]

I've seen this happen occasionally with the PayPal IPN module. It happens rarely enough I have not been able to determine an exact cause but it seems a number of uncommon steps will cause PayPal to lose track of the session (probably the wrong term) generated by Zen Cart. Both having trouble logging into PayPal and using a different email address between Zen and PayPal have been steps customers have taken that caused this problem. Of course, not all customers taking these steps had problems thus the problem in determining the exact cause.

You'll have to get in touch with the customer and ask them what they ordered. Zen has no record of it nor an existing shopping cart to complete.

[SPembleton]

Thank you both for the quick reply. I will look at switching over to the PayPal Express.