Customer Not Being Charged For One Item On Their Order-Random Problem

[fabienne]

In the interest of creating a complete story of the solution of the first item being charged at $0.00 on random orders, here is what happened next. I upgraded to Unlimited Plus. Within 24 hours I got one $0.00 first item (order 12016) but no more $0 items since then and I am at order 12150, 134 orders later. So saying, I may run into another one BUT I think that would be highly unlikely. There was one problem due to the fact that my upgrade had not propagated through the entire system yet when that order 12016 came through. I would say that the lack of memory allotted for my account caused the error (big clue were the many "out of memory" errors). Fingers crossed that the problem is over. Many thanks to you all.

[RodG]

Thanks for the update.

Fingers crossed that you'll be able to come back here in another few months with a further report of no more issues of this nature :-)

Cheers
RodG

[fabienne]

OK, here it is the end of September and I have not had this issue again. I think that I am more convinced that it was a question of my plan at 1and1 and that I needed more power there. My fingers are still crossed though. Again thank you for your help on this issue.

[fabienne]

My Zencart problem is back, I am sorry to say. Everything was great until I got one order where both of the items ordered were $0. Then it turned up once again on an order with 7 items, the first one was charged $0. There is one very interesting thing about this batch of problems: one of my customers had the same problem happen before! It happened to her once in early August when I was having a huge sale, and now again as I am having a big launch of my Halloween line. I wonder if it has to do with something in the customer's profile? I am keeping an eye out to see if this happens again with other customers who had the same problem earlier. So far, the customer I found is the only one who had the problem before. If you have anything wise to say, please do say it.

[mc12345678]

So have you setup anything to track what has been added in what oder or anything to be able to tell/repeat the issue? Right now there has been little to no informaton that really has offered how to reproduce the problem in order to solve the problem...

At the moment, it's kinda like the random check engine light that is always on until you take the car to be serviced and then it never lights for them and they can't detect any specific issue... Also still unclear about where in the process the price goes to zero. I might suggest a plugin like user tracking until reproducibility is determned.

[fabienne]

Hmmmm, the order of adding does not seem to have much effect on the outcome. I will look into that tomorrow more thoroughly but the thing which struck me as being the most likely trigger for this problem was that one out of all the people who had the problem last time came back this time and bought again AND that person had the same problem. This smells like smoke to me. I hope one of the others who bought last time comes back and buys this time from me and if I get another problem, I would say that I have two incidences (3 is a statistically significant match). So, I am thinking I have to check to see if one of the others bought from me and did not have a problem this time and so my theory crashes and burns, OR they have not and it's still viable.

Things are added in alphabetical order, I create the products that way and put them in the system that way. I need to see if there is some correlation between what is first on the list and what is messed up on the order (they can order in any sequence they like, not only alphabetically). I will check that tomorrow, thanks for suggesting that.

[fabienne]

Just got another one. The 0 item is one from my main catalog and the rest of the items are from the seasonal collection.

I tried upgrading my package with my webhost and it seemed to become less frequent. Is it a problem with a webhost rather than Zencart or the template for my Zencart?

The item is showing up on the Zencart invoice, but does not show up on the Paypal invoice.

Overall, this has effected 6 customers, two have ordered more than once from the time I put up my new site. One customer had two orders with $0 item, the other customer had a good order and one with $0 for the first item.

So, I can't see the thread which is running through the problem orders. It still appears random.

[mc12345678]

Have you any way to obseve perhaps the process taken to get to those points? I would suggest something liike user tracking, though I apparently botched the install sql and the functoning version is now buied in the thread a few pages back in it...

Right now, it seems that there is insufficient data here to provide much insite as stated previously...

[fabienne]

I will try the plug in. I will look for it on the Plug In page, as I think that is what you are indicating...that you put it up but it's not on a front page. I hope I read that right.

I wish that I could observe the process, and I managed to make it happen once. However, when I made it happen I didn't memorize the steps and I could never replicate it. Alas.

It seems intermittent, Very intermittent. That is why there is insufficient data.

Very frustrating. Thanks for responding.

[fabienne]

OK, I installed the plug in and it is running well (got some help with that as it's not the most simple thing in the world). It has been running and no problems occurred until today. I got an order where the customer ordered 10 items, the first 7 came in at $0, the last 3 were recorded just fine. That is awful but I went to the admin area to see what I could find out.

I looked for the transaction and I can't find it. Now, I may not know some trick to this but I suspect it's not there. I looked under the day it happened (today) and the time of day that the order was placed (12:25 pm aka 13:25 as this is military time) and there was nothing there. I did see one for 13:26, but the IP address was not the same. The address I was looking for ended in .37 and this one did not. Neither did any of the other transactions, none had an IP address ending in .37. I know that sometimes IP addresses change from one instance to another and I looked for the host address, it ended in "mycingular.net" and I could not find one which matched that either around the general time of the order. Number of clicks, I imagine, should be 10 or more, after all she bought 10 items and you would expect that she was clicking around before coming to the things she wanted, there were only activities which had one click near the time she had checked out, there was one above at 24 clicks but that was not the one I was after (the 24 click person looked at totally different items than were bought).

It looks like the User Tracking didn't catch this transaction at all, maybe that means that my cart didn't catch it but yet, I did get an order even though the first 7 items were $0.

Can anyone help me with this? I hope I am just not seeing something obvious before my face here, but I would have expected to see some transaction which I could have traced by either the IP address, the carrier IP address, the time of day and date, or the number of clicks.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this.