Linkpoint Processing Payment/No Order in Zen Cart

When it rains it pours. I had 3 of these in January related to Paypal IPN failures now I have two instances of it occurring with my First Data credit card processing via linkpoint API.

Customer payment is processed successfully and can be viewed on my First Data report on the linkpointcentral website. No order exists in Zen Cart.

This occurred on 12/16 and now again on 1/16. 250 other credit card transactions processed just fine during this time period.

The 12/16 transaction: no evidence of the order at all in the Zen Cart system (ie no order and no entry visible on the Credit Card Entry screen). The customer's account exists in the system with no orders. Transaction was successfully charged to the customers credit card account. I couldn't find a cause and wrote this off to being an anomaly. First Data went through a huge upgrade to their website in December and I thought this might have been related.

The 1/16 transaction: the linkpoint log shows two transactions back to back for this customer. The first processes the payment successfully and the second is declined as fraud/duplicate transaction. On the Zen Cart side I see one entry on the Credit Card Entry screen. The declined fraud/duplicate transaction. No order was ever recorded in the system.

My questions:

1. Any thoughts on why this happened? Without understanding why it happened I don't know if I can do something to capture the failures more quickly beyond more frequent reconciliation of payments to orders.

2. I installed the View Stuck Paypal Orders mod to re-capture lost orders for my Paypal problems. Does something similar exist for Linkpoint? I've asked the customer to tell me what was in their order but on a professional level I'd rather be able to retrieve that info myself.

Thanks for any insight anyone can provide! Kathy

pinkchalkstudio:

The 1/16 transaction: the linkpoint log shows two transactions back to back for this customer. The first processes the payment successfully and the second is declined as fraud/duplicate transaction. On the Zen Cart side I see one entry on the Credit Card Entry screen. The declined fraud/duplicate transaction. No order was ever recorded in the system.
Sounds like the customer clicked the Confirm button again while it was already processing their first click. The payment was approved, but when it came back to continue processing the page, they had already clicked again and broke the program flow due to the second click. Thus nothing was stored. And, since the payment had already been taken, the second click correctly showed up as a duplicate.

The default template has some basic protection to attempt to prevent clicking the Confirm button several times. Some folks have found that inadequate and have discussed some alternate methods elsewhere on the forum. You might find some of their discussion useful if this is a persistent problem with your payment module.

Thank you for your opinion Dr. Byte! That at least gives me an idea of what most likely happened.

I plan to take a quick look at the linkpoint transaction log when I get notified of a rejected transaction to make sure I identify these situations quickly, beyond that I think they're too infrequent for me to worry about.