Checkout Hangs Between Page 1 and Page 2

We have received user complaints that our checkout process hangs between page 1 (entering address information) and page 2 (entering credit card information). The issue does not occur on all transactions but happens often enough that we may be losing up to 50% of our potential web orders. We have not been able isolate any common factor, e.g., it's happended when users have used IE, Chrome and Firefox. Users do not get an error message, they just get a blank page that never goes away after they hit continue on page 1 of the checkout process.

We're using Zen Cart 1.3.8a with Algozone template ZC04A00408. We accept credit cards as our only form of payment and use the standard Authorize.net AIM payment module.

Any ideas/solutions?

Thanks,
Bert

Hi Bert,

What's the site address? And who are you using for your webhosting? Has the site always done this since installation, or is this a relatively recent phenomenon?

Christopher

Thanks, Christopher.

The site is https://www.mobilesource.com. Hoster is HostDepot (https://www.hostdepot.com), a company local to us that is owned by a friend. We believe this to have been an issue for us since the site when live in June. What bumped this up in priority is that we recently became concerned that the percentage of potential customers affected may be much greater than we originally believed.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Bert

Hi Bert,

First off, nice website!

Two things off the top of my head (as I had a similar issue with another client a few months ago)...

1. You might want to install a mod called "recover cart sales". This will show you what customers have added to their carts but never checked out. It will also give you a link to contact those customers to see if there was an issue with checkout, etc.:
   http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=100

2. Please turn on error logging, and report back any error messages you are getting here. You can find the instructions for turning on error logging here:
   http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=84613

If the pages are indeed hanging, it may very well produce an error and pinpoint exactly where the problem is.

All the best,

Christopher

Installing debug tool now. Will report on any results. Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Bert

Christopher, thanks very much.

We installed the debug code as you suggested and found errors in two places in out checkout process, one that we believe was causing the hang between page 1 and page 2 and another that was potentially causing a hang during the process of communicating with authorize.net.

Sample log messages for what we believe to be the page 1 to page 2 error:

[08-Oct-2010 12:05:03] PHP Warning: fopen(D:/InetPub/006/cache/zc_cc21d2f64edffccfe06d12dd3327bf64.sql) [<a href='function.fopen'>function.fopen</a>]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in D:\InetPub\006\includes\classes\cache.php on line 116

[08-Oct-2010 12:05:03] PHP Warning: fputs(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in D:\InetPub\006\includes\classes\cache.php on line 117

[08-Oct-2010 12:05:03] PHP Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in D:\InetPub\006\includes\classes\cache.php on line 118

Our hoster believes that he's corrected this problem. I'm not a PHP programmer so I can't really translate what he did for you.

Sample log messages for what we believe to be the authorize.net error:

[08-Oct-2010 12:46:18] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in D:\InetPub\006\includes\modules\payment\authorizenet_aim.php on line 536

We're not really sure what to do about this one. Any suggestions?

Thanks much for your help.

Cheers,
Bert

percipian:

Sample log messages for what we believe to be the authorize.net error:

[08-Oct-2010 12:46:18] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in D:\InetPub\006\includes\modules\payment\authorizenet_aim.php on line 536
That's telling you that when your store makes a request to the Authorize.net server and waits for a response, the response is taking more than 30 seconds to come back.

That's usually a problem with your hosting company's server performance or their internet connection.
It could also be a problem on the Authorize.net end, but if it were then I'd be expecting to have thousands of merchants complaining about it, not just you. And, since you say it's not affecting all of your transactions, it suggests a problem with your hosting company or their internet access/firewall/provider.

Since your server must use CURL to do the external connection to authnet, you could try testing using this script and adding &authnet=1 to the URL: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=434187#post434187 (the file is likely already on your server)

However, an IMPORTANT NOTE here ... The error you quoted will ONLY be appearing AFTER the customer has gone to the last page of checkout (checkout_confirmation screen) and clicks Submit to actually confirm their order. That's long AFTER they've supplied their credit card number on page 2 of checkout.
Your posts started out saying that you're having problems getting TO page 2 of checkout ... in which case none of the errors you reported have any relevance.