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

[mc12345678]

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.

Ummm.. 12:25pm military time is 1225... 1325 is 1:25pm... If you mean like Zulu time, then that's a different story which is related to the time zone of Greenwich (no adjustment for "time-zone").. For this "discussion" suggest looking at your watch, and looking at the time on your admin profile. Whatever difference is there now, look at when you received the notification of the purchase, and apply the same logic...

If using User Tracking, the purchase/purchaser will be evidenced by someone being logged as logged in (colored name on left side of the screen)... Hopefully in installation you didn't install the very latest version that was posted to the forum as it is missing a great deal of functionality from the version that was posted just before it... All because (again) I didn't write a good new user installation script... Anyways...

Because login typically occurs at the point of payment, you are not necessarily looking for as many clicks as items purchased... Further, a person may have multiple items already in their cart at the time of login which would automatically place the items ready to purchase...

Next the issue of IP address, well, your "purchase" email that is sent to the admin should identify the ip address that was logged by the system... That IP address should be searchable from the browser once the user tracking screen is up. Also want to be sure that showing all history for the day (over a certain limit of page reviews and the data is not displayed)... The record(s) searched are those that in one way or another encompass the time period of when the purchase was made.... It could have started at 0800 that morning (today) and could still be going on right now... But a session that started after the purchase event or ended before the purchase event is not likely to be of much help (at first)..

As to the "right" product... That seems to also still be in question unless you have spoken with the individual and confirmed with them that what you are seeing on your "order screen" is what they actually requested...

Ohh, and if installed per instructions, then all page loads that include the footer of the site would be logged, but if something "happens" that removes the footer section from display then the footer "tracker" would not activate.

[fabienne]

OK, my lack of military training is showing...The transaction happened at 12:25 PM and there is no activity at exactly 12:25 p.m.

I am sure that the version installed was the latest one. So, that hurts. Ow.

I cannot find the IP address anywhere. It isn't on the page for November 14th. Are you saying that if the transaction started before the 14th it might be on a previous page? I have no way of telling when the client started the transaction. If she started it, say, last Thursday and just now got around to buying it then I would never know.

I have been looking for an IP address ending in .37 and it isn't there.

As for the "right" product, that does seem to be a factor. She purchased product A, B, and C. The URL of each of them would show up in the details of the purchase (I have the pretty URLs so that would tell me what was bought). None of the products she bought show up around that time in the details.

It is highly unlikely that the things they have ordered are not the right ones. I am pretty familiar with buying habits and I doubt that someone would put 2 bottles of product J in the shopping cart and not mean to purchase them. That is pretty deliberate.

Here is another weird thing, I have a transaction which went through just fine at 11:33 am today. It does not show up on the User Tracker at all. I am looking in the area of "Start Time" and "End Time" but it's not there. Am I looking in the wrong place?

Would it help if I took a screen shot of one of the day's Activity trackers with some of the multiple clicks' "View Session" expanded so you could see it? You are the creator of this, I imagine that you would know if there is something which is not working right or not installed correctly. I don't want to expose anything which should not be published regarding my clients or my site though.

I am really stumped.

[mc12345678]

First things first. You give me more credit than I am due. I am notthe creator of the plugin, merely a contributor building on the work of those before me. DrByte was the originator, with many before me adding to the functionality. A few years back in an effort to return to the community what I had seen as improvements for the way it worked in support of what I wanted to get out of it, I reached out to ask if it was okay to return to others what I had done and was encouraged to do what might seem to provide benefit to others.

So... The next thing and this is laid out in the forum, but the most recent version really is an old version that has SQL for a new install that works out-of-the-box. So there is a lot of functionality that was added that does not appear in the latest version. Still "works" the same, but is missing several options.

In order to "restore" the download back to where it should be would require repackaging the download and this time with the correct new user sql... But, in parallel with that, another ZC contributor was also working on a change to bring the code more in line with the expectations of the ZC team, but the work was incomplete... So, this left two major issues to try to address for the next upload... Well then some other things came up and unfortunately User Tracking hasn't made it back onto my radar yet because of other priorities.

But, let's leave that behind for the moment.

The history... For the date 14 Oct 2015, only clicks that are made from 0000.00 to 2359.59 will be associated with that day. If a customer is navigating the site beginning the day before, then the first click that occurs on the current day will be logged as occurring on today with a start time of the first click made during the current day. The end time is related to the last time that the customer clicked while their session was active (~15 minutes since last click/recorded action, etc). Items in the list (at least in the truly more recent version) are such that they are listed by the most recent end time being at the top, regardless of what the start time was. So someone that just started shopping could show up next to someone that had been browsing for an hour.

So, the big thing, assuming that the version running tracks like expected, then the individual that made the purchase should appear on the left side of the rows of data at least at the point that they would need to be logged in... As far as protecting customers? Would agree that do not necessarily want to post all of the customer details (ip address, username, items reviewed, session IDs, etc...)

Basically, the code records when a page is loaded to the point of displaying the entire screen (at least makes it to the footer of the page and that the footer is displayed on every page including the checkout pages). Right now anything that can be determined will help back track to what is/was going on... The first thing is to identify available information about the recent purchase(s)... Once that is identified, can then work backwards from there...

If need be, you could go to phpmyadmin and review the logged data for the ip address that you supposedly have identified/are looking for...

For the purchase that went through successfully, should see on the left side the name of someone logged in, otherwise the name would/should be Guest located just under the phrase Session ID.

[fabienne]

OK, I think I will try to go into the myPHPadmin and take a look there and see if I can find the string of activities associated with that IP address. Any clues on where a good place to look would be? myPHPadmin is a huge place and I am not that familiar with where the activity tracking would be found. Any clues would be appreciated.

I am looking in the MySQL database, to be precise.

[fabienne]

OK, disregard what I said before, I did find the way to track down the client's IP address and (get into the database-->User Tracking in the left column--> click that then choose IP Address and do a search for it.

I got the transaction User Tracking and downloaded it to a spreadsheet. OK, here is where experts can see things that I can't: the only thing I see that is at all unusual about the transaction is that there was a time out in the middle of it. It looks to me like she made the transaction on her cell phone. You might look at the transaction and see the obvious error but I can't. These are the pieces of information I captured:

Cust ID

Click ID

Full Name

session ID

IP Address

Time Entry

Time Last Click

Last Page URL

Referred Url

Page Description

Customer's Host Address

What among those is going to give me a clue as to what the problem is? Thanks. I am learning a lot but still have to get to the bottom of the cause of the problem.

I know this is the right transaction because it is the only transaction she has made with me.

[mc12345678]

Technically one thing that you are trying to do is to recreate the event. From there to follow through the process(es) and identify where the problem occurs... Right now all the information that has been really gathered is that occasionally a purchase is made where two or more items are in the final sale where one of the items displays as being free... It is not known at what point in the process the "value" goes to zero, it is not known which product(s) cause it, it is not known if it happens at a certain time of day... Basically as said, know that a purchase is made with a problem presented.... Now trying to reproduce the problem (consistently) so that might be able to address it properly.

So, my suggestion for now is to try to track backwards to their first interaction with the store that led to either storing a cart until next login or to the purchase of the items that appear incorrect. Then do the same thing(s) that they did and see if you can reproduce the problem... See if there is anything abnormal happening along the way, if come to understand how/what is going on then, can figure out how to stop it from happening in the future...

[fabienne]

WEll, the mystery has outed and I think it's solved. I wrote to the client who had 7 of 10 items come in as $0. Here is what she wrote back:

Hi.
The 3 items are correct. I was deciding on which ones to buy and forgot to delete those other 7 when I made my final decision. Sorry for the confusion.

So, somehow it is possible to put things in your cart and then zero them out before you check out. I have not tried to do that myself but I bet I can replicate it. Sometimes clients don't see the button where you take things out of the cart and could just be zeroing them out themselves...or something. But this explains the randomness of the event, and why everything appears to be working just fine. So it isn't something wrong with my Zencart, it's that clients are finding new ways to delete purchases from their cart.

This has been a long and frustrating problem. Thank you so much for hanging in there with me. Who knows, maybe someone else will have this problem and read this and be saved the time and energy getting through it. I have spent masses of time (and worry) on it and am just relieved that I can go back to being a merchant and stop worrying about this.

[mc12345678]

Well, that certainly is useful information. Now though, placing items in a cart and then using a quantity of zero should result in the item not carrying forward in the checkout process even with a quantity of zero.

Are/were the items tracked by Stock By Attributes?

[mc12345678]

Well, that certainly is useful information. Now though, placing items in a cart and then using a quantity of zero should result in the item not carrying forward in the checkout process even with a quantity of zero.

Are/were the items tracked by Stock By Attributes?

FWIW, just ran a purchase through a system setup with the current version of SBA available through http://github.com/potteryhouse for ZC 1.5.4, added two different SBA tracked items, then while on the shopping cart, modified the quantity of the first added item to zero (without selecting the delete button), the item was removed from the cart, progressed to checkout, email received about the order only reflected the one item that was last in the cart.

So would say, although it is good to know that custmers are only being charged for what they have indicated they wanted in to purchase, the system response is abnormal and something is causing it. Although perhaps not currently a significant issue, it should be resolved else things may get complicated if another issue arises...

[fabienne]

OK, I am back in front of a computer and can answer your questions. First, I am not using attributes to control stock. I just put in the quantity I have and let it go that way. I don't need to tightly control my inventory, so I don't complicate it.

Second, I think that is a good idea, to resolve the problem so it won't get out of hand, but how? I have spent this sort of time on it and am not an expert in Zencart by a long shot. Is there someone I could hire to help with this? I have passing understanding of Zencart and have been able to get through most problems, but this one...I think it smells like it's out of my pay grade and it would take someone who is an expert in PHP and zencart to get to the bottom of it.

I drive a car, but I am not a mechanic. I can fix a flat tire but getting the fuel injection system to time right is out of my circle of confidence.