client having "blank page returned" when trying to do a cc purchase

I am new to this, so if I ask stupid questions - sorry. I use v1.5 and had an issue with a client having "blank page returned" when trying to do a cc purchase. I tried to do one myself and got the same response. I read through the forums, got to #21 and try the solution by adding the line, changed all my products to "virtual" and "always free shipping" - I only have downloadable products. Tried to do the purchase again - only to be returned to my site and got the message:

We are sorry for the inconvenience; however, at the present time we are unable to use PayPal to process orders from the geographic region you selected as your PayPal address. Please continue using normal checkout and select from the available payment methods to complete your order.

Does not matter what I do- tried numerous times with Credit Card and 'Pay with my PayPal account" and every time got the same message. Also had some customers, reporting the same problem. I removed the line as in #21, changed my products back to not virtual an require shipping address . no luck.
I do not have any zones set up in my admin and has the Freeshipper module installed.
Some customers were able to complete their transactions before the blank page episode, but since then it seems that everyone gets the same message.
Please Help!!!!

What are all the ways by which your site is customized or different from a brand new uncustomized install, both in terms of PHP files and all admin configuration setting changes, tax zones, tax rates, countries, state-zones, geo-zones etc?

(Ya, I know you said "I do not have any zones set up in my admin". That's the geo-zones part, but not the Zones where states are matched to countries, etc, and not the setup of taxes ... and if you do have taxes set up then you must have "zones set up in your admin" somewhere ... so please clarify that also.)

Hallo - I am really a beginner with all this - so if I do not answer in full - I most probably do not know exactly what you want and were to find it - so be patient please.
I do not have any taxes set up - so no zones for that. I did not have changed any thing to block/permit certain countries/ states /zones (That I know of!)
I do not now where in admin is the geo-part and zone were the states are match to countries what my settings is :in Locations/countries all are available - nothing changed there. Countries and ISO codes are listed there.
In ZONES: there are 8 pages with zones listed -from Australia to Italy - I have never changed thing here - but I just wonder, there are no US zones or South African Zones - can this be where a problem lays? I've never looked at this before as I did not exclude/specify any zone in any setting.
Zone Definitions: nothing configured here - displaying 0 of 0
Tax classes and Tax rates also 0 of 0
I installed the line in given in#21 of the thread in the Forum for "PayPal has unexpectedly returned a Blank page " but did not change any other php files.
I did not get a bank page again when I tried a checkout test again, but then got this:
We are sorry for the inconvenience at the present time we are unable to use PayPal to process orders from the geographic region you selected as your PayPal address. Please continue using normal checkout and select from the available payment methods to complete the order.
I am sorry if I am longwinded but I hope this can help.
My products are all downloads , all set up an non virtual and shipping address required as in the FAQ explained and it works well - did not have any problems with this before.
I've got the Free shipper module activated, also Flat Rate and Store Pickup - but as I do not have any shippable products, the shipping page should be skipped by Checkout?
I feel that something is missing with my setup re zones etc. but do not know where to look.
Thanks for helping Alida

alida:

In ZONES: there are 8 pages with zones listed -from Australia to Italy - I have never changed thing here - but I just wonder, there are no US zones or South African Zones There should be United States zones for each state. But I doubt there are any in there by default for South Africa.
If you've not changed anything there, then I wouldn't expect a problem.

alida:

I've got the Free shipper module activated, also Flat Rate and Store Pickup - but as I do not have any shippable products, the shipping page should be skipped by Checkout?
Yes, the shipping page should be skipped when the customer's basket contains only downloads. Are you saying that the Shipping page is actually showing up?

No, it does not, what I mean is - do there have to be a shipping module installed and if so which one? (as no shipping are actually used?
Can I add the US state zones and also other countries somehow?
If I try to do a test checkout with PayPal, I get the Geographic region message, so I don't get any where - as I am in South Africa should I add that somewhere?
What I cannot understand is that everything worked ok, got a test done, got some orders through, and then all of a sudden start to get these problems and now everything is a mess.
As I said I am a total dummy, but can I delete and re-install the shipping modules/ zones etc with WinSCP or will it cause more harm?
Alida

It's prudent to have a shipping module installed. Flat Rate is fine. But, as you said, when all your products are downloads the shipping is skipped entirely.

In your Admin, in your list of countries, is South Africa present? Has it been tampered with? Spelling changed? short-codes changed from defaults?

The "no payment modules for your geographic zone" message occurs when the customer's billing address doesn't match available countries in your store. And, IF you also have zones for provinces/states set up for the country they've selected then their province/state must also match one of what you've set up. Further, if you've also added Zone Definitions then your payment module will have a "Payment zone" dropdown, from which you could choose a zone to restrict that module to work with. If you don't wish to impose any restrictions, leave that to --None--.

Out-of-the-box using PayPal with South Africa addresses has no issue. But if you've changed the default country data, or the default zones data, or imposed zone restrictions in your paypal module, you will get the error message you quoted.

Hallo; In my list of countries are 195 countries including South Africa. My payment module (PayPal Express0 the zones are set on "none".I did not tamper here, but I did not do the initial set-up of my site myself - only set up the attributes/products and the PayPal Express module myself. What I do know is that the guy who did the initial set up deleted all countries but South Africa and then put it back when I asked him to. But I did not change default country/ zone data. What worries me it that everything was working and then all of a sudden these problems started. Will it help if I revert to a backup made before these problems started?
And then also the zones in admin - like I said there is Countries from Australia to Italy each with states/ provinces all set up- but not for the rest of the countries like the US - no states shown. Feels to me that something went missing here? Can I add it in some way - and how?

Oh gosh.
Ya, you can't just blindly go deleting countries like that, because now you've altered all the country and zone IDs internally.

Restore the following tables from your database backup taken before the hacking of your countries data:

• countries
• zones
• zones_to_geo_zones
• geo_zones
• tax_rates

Hi, the counties were delete with the initial setup, before I started to upload my products - so I do not have a backup that will include all of that. I did ask the guy to install the 5 items listed on the server so that it will be available - please remember that you work with dummy nr 1. The changes that I can see now in my admin under locations/ zones are:
Countries - still there with 195 countries and ISO codes.
Zones - no change - 8 pages with 157 zones - no USA/ UK/South Africa
Zone definitions: a folder called GLOBAL ZONE , status not configured, number of zones 0, number of tax rates 1
Tax classes: ID 2 Tax class zero rated
Tax Rates: priority 1; Tax class Zero rated; Zone Global; Tax rate 0%; Description Zero Rated

I've done a test order again, same results.
I had about 20 orders for free designs since last night - got no complaints - so I suppose all of them went through without problem.
only when PayPal gets involved that the problems start.
I got an email from PayPal to ask my opinion of their support service - I also asked their help when the problem reared its ugly head - but got no reply - but for the questionnaire to rate their service??
I had a look at Zen cart v1.5 installation files to compare what I see there to what I see in the files when I log in with WinSCP - will I be able to learn anything that way to see if something is missing in my php files? (remember the dummy) I still got a feeling that when PayPal connects to my site there is something missing - but what and where?
I don't know if I give you the correct information to help. Thanks for trying.

A fresh new install has I believe 243 countries and 296 zones.

The problem right now is that to wipe out and replace yours also breaks all the address-book entries for your existing customers, since those addresses contain zone ID and country ID numbers that are linked to your existing country/zone ID numbers. So putting your countries and zones back to what they should be originally might end up changing all your customers' addresses to suddenly point to very different country/zone(state/province) values.
So what's needed is to have someone inspect every one of your customers' addresses, note what their current countryID and zone ID are set to, and then update every one of those to what they ought to be after putting back all the original country and zone data.

And even then there's no guarantee that that'll actually fix your occasional errors from PayPal.

An occasional error from PayPal I think can be sorted out - it worries me though that I cannot do a successful transaction at all - I will also ask more people to test for me from South Africa to see if they get the same result. As I do not get any reaction from PayPal I do not know if the problem occurs for more regions. Can I then add more zones to my zone list manually without doing a wipe-out? I have more than 500 customer addresses on the site?? As all my products are downloads - will it matter if country code/ zone in an existing address is changed?
I got a successful transaction from New Zealand - so I do not know if it is just local transactions that does not work. But the original blank page came from the US- that is when I tested, got the same result - install the line in#21 got the geo -region message.
What I did suggest to customers not able to do a transaction, is to do a manual transaction and I will then email the files to them - but then their order will not show up in their order history for future reference. Is there any way to put their order then Manually into their account from the admin area so that they can access it later via download?
thanks for your patience.

alida:

What I do know is that the guy who did the initial set up deleted all countries but South Africa and then put it back when I asked him to.
Apparently he didn't, based on your previous post:
alida:

Countries - still there with 195 countries and ISO codes.
Zones - no change - 8 pages with 157 zones - no USA/ UK/South Africa

DrByte:

A fresh new install has I believe 243 countries and 296 zones.
If you have your database person put back the missing country records and missing zone records (based on country_id and zone_id) then that may resolve your "USA is missing" problem.

Thank you I will try again.

Hallo, I found a thread about zones and countries in the forum with a list of countries and their codes ( a SQL patch -is that the correct term for it?) Now as I said I am not an expert. Can I use this to add missing countries to my admin>location>countries?
There is also a list with Zones and codes for France - are there a similar list available for other countries USA/UK etc. and can I add it manually to my admin>locations>zones
Will it help at all?
In zones/taxes the data guy added a folder "GLOBAL" but with nothing in it - I cant see the sense in it?
I want to ask another question about adding products to a customers account without going through checkout - should I start a different thread about that?
I'm really desperate about this PayPal issue - and being so ignorant about the technical stuff does not help at all.

alida:

I want to ask another question about adding products to a customers account without going through checkout - should I start a different thread about that?
Yes, that's unrelated to this present discussion.

alida:

Hallo, I found a thread about zones and countries in the forum with a list of countries and their codes ( a SQL patch -is that the correct term for it?) Now as I said I am not an expert. Can I use this to add missing countries to my admin>location>countries?
There is also a list with Zones and codes for France - are there a similar list available for other countries USA/UK etc. and can I add it manually to my admin>locations>zones
Will it help at all?
Sigh.
It would be better if your "data guy" would take the original Zen Cart 'countries' and 'zones' tables and match up the countries_id and zone_id values with the ones already in your database, and insert any missing ones into your current database. That's what my previous post was getting at.

Or, and this is RISKY because as I've described before you've been using bad data for a long time, and have customers using the potentially wrong country/zone values in their address book records, you could delete your countries and zones tables and rebuild them using the original sql for installing Zen Cart. Then fix any customers' address book entries to repair the broken entry_country_id and entry_zone_id values so they point to correct new values.

Thanks, my "data Person" feels the need to do some more research into this problem and as I meant it when I said I am a total dummy - I will just have to wait it out and see if the "research" are going to solve this for me.
I did add the USA and South African zones and codes into my admin>locations>zones but I think I am just putting some flesh over the skeleton without achieving anything.

You can't add formerly-deleted countries and zones via the admin console. They need to be added into mysql manually because the id numbers need to match the original values, and using the admin console won't set those ids properly.
The very act of re-adding them via the admin console is exactly what will make it very complicated to put back the correct values and then need to have to go fix all customer records that were created using those incorrectly-entered records by making all the id values match up again correctly.

So should I delete them again?

The data-corruption cleanup is something I would charge several hundred dollars to do as a professional consultant. Instead of charging a consulting fee, I hope you'll consider donating to the Zen Cart project via https://www.zen-cart.com/donate

Here is the process that needs to be followed. Most of it will be done with phpMyAdmin in your hosting control panel or a similar tool like Navicat or SQLYog:

• make a complete database backup and test that it can be restored reliably if a disaster happens while you are making the following risky changes
• identify all entry_country_id and entry_zone_id values in your address_book table.
• match all those values to your current countries and zones tables
• for any entry_countries_id and countries_id greater than 245 make note of the id number and name. You'll need it later. Also note which customers_id is associated to all those address_book entries using those countries_id greater than 245.
• for any entry_zones_id and zones_id greater than 299 make note of BOTH the zone_country_id and zone_name associated with them in order to fix things later. Also note which customers_id from address_book is associated with these extra zones.
• now delete both the countries and zones tables from your database
• now install the original countries and zones tables from the original Zen Cart install SQL files. I stress: use the original code, not some mangled version that's deleted stuff out of it.
• now look up the country names you noted earlier. Note the countries_id now assigned to those names. Update all your address_book entries using the old entry_countries_id to the new countries_id values you just noted.
• now look up all the zone names you noted earlier. There are TWO parts to this one:
  (a) For any that DO exist in the zones table, note their zones_id values and update your address_book entry_zones_id values you noted earlier to the correct new values.
  (b) For any that do NOT exist in the new zones table, you can add them manually via your Zen Cart Admin->Locations/Taxes->Zones screen. But then once you've added them, go back to phpMyAdmin and find their new zones_id number and update the address_book entry_zones_id from the old numbers to the new zones_id you just created for those.

Now test test test test test by looking at customer records for all the customers whose address_book records you changed, to make sure their addresses show correctly in the Admin when looking at their details on the Customers->Customers screen. (Specifically test using the Customers screen, NOT the orders screen, because the orders screen only shows historical data from old orders and not from customer address books.)

You'll probably need to rebuild your Zone Definitions again since the country/zone pairs you've associated with them are probably wrong now and thus those Zone Definitions (usually used with Tax Rates and shipping restrictions) won't fire and thus taxes/shipping won't calculate correctly.