Suddenly Paypal IPN blank screen when storing order

Hi all. I've a problem with payments via paypal IPN. The problem is that, after making the payment and showing the paypal confirmation page (the one with the transaction ID), no order is stored in ZenCart DB.
If I press the "return to merchant site" button, the browser starts loading the page, but after some minutes nothing happens and only a blank page is shown.

In my case, the link to the merchant site is this:

http://shop.bajca.com/index.php?tx=STRINGOF17CHARS&st=Completed&amt=17.00&cc=EUR&cm=zenid%253d1rpifspcpfqj9tv8kd1fhcfjs4&item_number=Store+Receipt&main_page=checkout_process&referer=paypal&merchant_return_link=Torna+a+sito&form_charset=UTF-8

I already tried verifying errors in the DB also executing a "REPAIR TABLE" on all tables, but no error has been found.

Our site is up from about one year and it always worked properly. The last transaction via paypal has been done on December 12, 2009. From then customers chose other type of payments, so we found this problem only some days ago.

Looking at the DB, I can found that the in the table customers_basket the products are still in the basket, and in the paypal_session there's the session created by ZenCart (equal to che "cm" parameter in the link above, only removing "zenid%253d"). The expiry field is correct (it is 1270308925, about April 3, 2010 at 5:35PM, the test transaction has been done yesterday afternoon)

I also tried setting the expiry date in the past, or changing the session id in the DB, hoping to see a timeout or error page, but without success. Always a blank page and no operation carried out.

The site is hosted on a server in the server farm of my company.

I hope you could help me. Thanks all for your support! :)

Here the version info page of ZenCart:

Host Database: localhost (127.0.0.1)
OS Server: Linux 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5
Database: MySQL 5.0.45
Data Server: 01.04.2010 18:42:05
Data Database: 01.04.2010 18:42:04
Server Up Time: 18:42:05 up 16 days, 5:43, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
HTTP Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Versione PHP: 5.1.6 (Zend: 2.1.0)
PHP Memory Limit: 64M
PHP Safe Mode: Off
PHP File Uploads: On
Max Size: 2M
POST Max Size: 8M
Database Data Size: 817 kB
Database Index Size: 483 kB

Zen Cart 1.3.8a
Patch: 1::
Livello Patch Database: 1.3.8

Hi, I'm having the exact same problem. Have you found a fix?

Elvandar:

Hi all. I've a problem with payments via paypal IPN. The problem is that, after making the payment and showing the paypal confirmation page (the one with the transaction ID), no order is stored in ZenCart DB.

There are several ways to deal with this:

1. Use Express Checkout instead of IPN. Express Checkout is much more reliable because it's not subject to all the problems which PayPal's old IPN architecture has.

2. Troubleshoot all the usual IPN-related issues: http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

3. If your problems are with v1.3.8, try using 1.3.9 instead, since many bugs have been fixed there: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=2

jrmtz:

Hi, I'm having the exact same problem. Have you found a fix?

Yes, we recently reconfigured the firewall on that PC, and the problem was that with the new configuration it was blocking all outbound connections, so when PayPal sent the "transaction ok" message, ZenCart was unable to send the acknowledge and the order wasn't stored in the database.

We opened port 80 and 443 in the firewall and all returned to work well :smile:

Thank you DrByte,

I found the fix in one of your old post. I'm using GoDaddy as my hosting company and I'm using PayPal Standard in order to accept credit cards through PayPal. PayPal Express will not work for me.

The fix:

1. IF YOU ARE USING GODADDY HOSTING, go to Admin->Configuration->My Store->CURL Proxy Status, and turn it off.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=612520#post612520

Can you recomend any other credit card payment solution?

jrmtz:

Can you recomend any other credit card payment solution?
Sure. See the Recommended Services link at the top of this page.