Blank Orders Generated by PayPal During Payment Review

Running latest version of PayPal plugin that comes with ZC 1.5.1. PayPal files are unmodified.

This site gets hundreds of orders per day and is quite high volume for a typical Zen Cart website. Whenever PayPal does a review of a payment, it causes Zen Cart to generate a second order with a new trans ID and same amount as the payment being reviewed. It's not impacting customers at all, but it can be a bit confusing for the administrator as well as an extra hassle to have to delete the duplicate order. When the duplicate order is generated, the following is added to the order comments:

PayPal status: Pending paymentreview @ 08:02:09 Jul 03, 2013 PDT
Trans ID:7TM30223A32711602
Amount: 57.22 USD

The PayPal plugins probably need to be modified to ignore these communications, or somehow link them up to the original order rather than generate a second order.

You said:

1. A blank order is created
2. Comments are added to the order.

Are the comments correctly added to the existing order?

The comment is being added to the new blank order. The original order appears to be untouched and has no indication that it is being reviewed.

That means it's been unable to match up the incoming IPN with an existing order. Thus it's treating it as new (hence the new order) and not updating the old order with the incoming comments.

That could be something amuck with the ipn-handler and/or paypal-functions files, or something that's changed in the way paypal is sending the data or the way your site is storing the data it's trying to compare against.

Those files are the default from ZC 1.5.1. Have you seen this working on other sites? It's very rare that PayPal does a payment review so this could have easily gone unchecked.

I can confirm that blank orders are being generated by payment reviews and eCheck notification

I'm also using an un-modded 1.5.1 PayPal module