PayPal IPN Payments being received but product purchased not showing

I am having problems with PayPal IPN. we are receiving the emails with only the amount of purchase, their name, and phone number. The rest of the information is useless. I need to be able to see what the customer ordered and their instructions. Even when i go to my PayPal account it still does not show the information needed. How can i fix this? Also, would it be wiser to use the PayPal express module?

The symptoms you describe are classic indicators of a problem that can happen with the Website Payments Standard module where the IPN notification sent from PayPal to your server doesn't get processed by your server ... either it's blocked and is not received, or encounters a problem processing what it does receive. Could be a problem at PayPal. Could be a problem at your hosting company. Could be a problem with your server. Could be a problem with addons you've installed. Could be a problem with .htaccess or security settings you've added. Could be a problem with things you've configured inside your PayPal account. Could be a problem with settings in your Zen Cart PayPal details.

Related article: http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

Just for the record, I have the same problem too and it's happened over the last few days. My site was working just fine and now I don't receive an order confirmation and my customers report that PayPal "hangs". The orders are not being written in my database and so I have no idea what my customers are ordering.:no:

Several possible causes have been suggested - can you suggest a way to work towards the solution?

thanks
W
https://www.archerytrousers.co.uk

Sorry I went off and checked a few things and came back to find I couldn't edit the previous message.

So, no change in hosting, no edit of .htaccess, no change in IPN notification preferences at PayPal or Auto return setting. No modules installed/removed and no changes to Zen Cart version. This literally worked one day 21st June and stopped 22nd June.

Payments are being processed by PayPal and notification not received by Zen Cart - no order is created in the database. So, this sounds like the IPN is either not received or not processed. So it's a problem with the host???

Wendy

So in truly annoying way, I turned on debugging PayPal payments in Zen Cart and made a transaction for myself - good to review what it looks like from a customer viewpoint as well!

Yes, the transaction went through without difficulty and with all notifications correct.

What if this is about the response time of your server? So if there's some kind of network congestion or your ISP is sometimes a little slow in responding. Would the process timeout? I guess it might .... is this time set somewhere?

any thoughts appreciated
W

Perhaps it was a system problem on PayPal's end?
http://developer.paypal-portal.com/t5/blogs/blogpage/blog-id/mts_updates

I've just seen another instance of this problem. Again no changes have been made, the PayPal payment is processed but no confirmation email sent to customer or us and no record of the order on the website - customer account set up OK. I received orders last night with PayPal payments.

Is there a timeout issue here? The payment was processed at 11.24 UK time so this may be a busy time.

Whilst it's one way of building relations with customers, I'm not sure phoning them and asking what they ordered is really a good idea:no:

So, the confirmation turned up this time, 5 hours after the PayPal payment had been processed. Hmm
W

One of my customers also reported such behavior - order is created but without any products.

Well, this now seems to be "normal" with the email confirmation arriving some 4 hours after the order has been placed. I guess it's a bottleneck somewhere between PayPal and Zen Cart ...

W

I just wanted to say I have a customer that is having this problem as well. And again, nothing was changed. Now I did log in to his paypal account and went to IPN history and I see the last order queued.

This order he got an email from paypal that he received money but the order is not in zencart. The IPN history shows the transaction but the ipn is queued.

So is this queued ipn a problem at paypal, or did it try and could not send it waiting to try again later? I checked the link to the ipn_main_handler.php and it is valid and responding.

I'm going to send an email to paypal support and will post their answer here.

distanceDemon:

Well, this now seems to be "normal" with the email confirmation arriving some 4 hours after the order has been placed. I guess it's a bottleneck somewhere between PayPal and Zen Cart ...

W
The bottleneck is in PayPal's servers. Sometimes they get backlogged in processing the notifications.

You can avoid that delay problem by using Express Checkout instead of IPN/Website Payments Standard.

Thanks for that Dr Byte, I'll investigate making the change.
W

Just a comment on my own experiences - A while back it seemed to take anything up to an hour for the order to appear on my site, so don't panic too quickly.

Had the same problem this morning with one payment received but no order details, found that if you go to your Paypal account>Profile>Instant payment notifications, you can tick and resend the offending IPN which in my case created the order. Not a fix to the actual problem, but may save that embarassing phone call to your customer....

This happened to me the first time about 6 months ago. I refunded the customer and asked her to order again, and the same thing happened. I thought it was zen-cart as my installation was only a couple of months along.

However, now I know it is now with PayPal, because eventually orders came through, though one that I did as a test never actually did.

Yesterday when I logged into PayPal they had a notice at the top saying something like this "Please excuse our virtual dust while we do renovations, some aspects of PayPal will not work".

So now I am sitting with payments from customers from late last evening and still no order confirmation and no clue what to ship to them. I am going to give it another couple of hours and then issue refunds, TURN OFF PAYPAL, and then go to authorize.net payments only. This kind of thing is not acceptable. I have paid a small fortune in PayPal fees, I expect the service to work.

So there is NOTHING WRONG WITH ZENCART. This is ALL PAYPAL!!!

Sharni

How can you do a test order through paypal?

SilverKop:

How can you do a test order through paypal?

Simply do a normal order, and use PayPal's refund option (from your PayPal transaction details page) to refund the transaction. It'll refund the money and the fees fully.

DrByte:

Simply do a normal order, and use PayPal's refund option (from your PayPal transaction details page) to refund the transaction. It'll refund the money and the fees fully.

Many thanks, that worked a treat and system working fine.

My customer had problems and I only received payment details and not order details but this was done on the 19th August. Paypal's fault:P

Hi Dr. Byte,

I'm having exactly the same problem that the thread starter has. I'm having no luck solving this issue. Basically, while testing my entire check out process, I performed a real transaction, and got payment confirmation from Paypal. However, no order is showing on my zen cart, neither did I get an email with the order details. Below is the Paypal debug log, could you help me to identify where the problem might be, thank you so much for your assistance!!

2010-07-16 08:55:26

(live transaction) --> https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp
Request Headers:
Array
(
[0] => Content-Type: text/namevalue
[1] => X-VPS-Timeout: 45
[2] => X-VPS-VIT-Client-Type: PHP/cURL
[3] => X-VPS-VIT-Integration-Product: PHP::Zen Cart(tm) - PayPal/NVP
[4] => X-VPS-VIT-Integration-Version: 1.3.9b
)

Request Parameters: {SetExpressCheckout}
Array
(
[AMT] => 51.30
[ITEMAMT] => 51.30
[LOCALECODE] => CA
[PAYMENTACTION] => Sale
[ALLOWNOTE] => 1
[LANDINGPAGE] => Billing
[REQCONFIRMSHIPPING] => 1
[RETURNURL] => http://artonbeads.net/ipn_main_handler.php?type=ec
[CANCELURL] => http://artonbeads.net/index.php?main_page=login&ec_cancel=1
[PAGESTYLE] => Primary
[METHOD] => SetExpressCheckout
[CURRENCYCODE] => CAD
[USER] => order_api1.artonbeads.net
[PWD] => ****************
[VERSION] => 60.0
[SIGNATURE] => ****************************************************6IFR
)

Response:
Array
(
[] =>
[CURL_ERRORS] => (7) Failed to connect to 66.211.168.126: Permission denied
)

(7) Failed to connect to 66.211.168.126: Permission denied
Array
(
[url] => https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp
[http_code] => 0
[header_size] => 0
[request_size] => 0
[filetime] => -1
[ssl_verify_result] => 0
[redirect_count] => 0
[total_time] => 0
[namelookup_time] => 3.3E-05
[connect_time] => 0
[pretransfer_time] => 0
[size_upload] => 0
[size_download] => 0
[speed_download] => 0
[speed_upload] => 0
[download_content_length] => 0
[upload_content_length] => 0
[starttransfer_time] => 0
[redirect_time] => 0
)

SetExpressCheckout, Elapsed: 11ms -- Failed
(7) Failed to connect to 66.211.168.126: Permission denied
Array
(
[url] => https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp
[http_code] => 0
[header_size] => 0
[request_size] => 0
[filetime] => -1
[ssl_verify_result] => 0
[redirect_count] => 0
[total_time] => 0
[namelookup_time] => 3.3E-05
[connect_time] => 0
[pretransfer_time] => 0
[size_upload] => 0
[size_download] => 0
[speed_download] => 0
[speed_upload] => 0
[download_content_length] => 0
[upload_content_length] => 0
[starttransfer_time] => 0
[redirect_time] => 0
)

miffy22:

(7) Failed to connect to 66.211.168.126: Permission denied
That's an error message reported by CURL when your server attempted to use CURL to connect to the PayPal server to submit a transaction-related request.
Only your hosting company can sort out the problems causing CURL not to connect properly. Your hosting company's server administrator should be able to resolve the permission problems preventing CURL from working. They've probably got overly limiting restrictions configured on the server, preventing it from being able to do the communication required for advanced operations such as ecommerce.