New Orders Not Recording and New Order Emails not being sent

Hi, I have recently updated my zen cart to 1.5.0 since I thought that was what was causing the problem I am asking about. The version I had running was 1.3.7, and I have updated using the official procedure for updating. We had a simple store, with no additional modules installed. We are running MySQL version 5.0.96. The php version is 5.2.17 and was updated through the hosting company well in advance of the problem described below.

The site was working perfectly fine for quite a while (a number of years, actually). Then, sometime between 11/24/2012 and 1/4/2013, the new orders function stopped working. We no longer receive an order confirmation email to the email address listed in Configuration > Email Options, and the customer does not receive it either. The email function on my server is working fine, as I tested it outside of zen cart, and emails are received.

My hosting company is godaddy, and to my knowledge, there were no major updates in that period. Also, the order confirmation emails, as well as all other email functions, were working properly prior to November 24, 2012. At this time, if an email is sent through the cart, the email is not received. So, all email functions have stopped working, although prior to November of 2012, I was not able to send emails properly through the cart, however, the emails that should be sent to the administrator were being sent properly. This was not a big deal to me.

In addition, when an order is placed, the paypal transaction goes through (with no purchase information), however, the order disappears. In other words, it does not appear in the "New Orders" area on the main admin home page, and it can not be found in Customers > Orders either. I assumed that it was an update issue that would be resolved when I updated the cart, but that has turned out not to be the case.

I need to get this working, as right now I have been forced to email people who make a purchase outside of zen cart, asking them what they purchased. I am able to obtain their shipping information from the "New Customers" tab on the home page, since that works but their order is not recorded.

As I said, no other admin settings were changed between that time and now, and I can't figure out why these two functions, having to do with order recording, have stopped working simultaneously. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

You said this no-email-and-no-order phenomenon occurs only with PayPal payments, right?

Is it correct that you're using PayPal Payments Standard? If so, what you describe is common, and is a result of PayPal's servers being unable to tell your server about the new order.

You have basically two options:
a) Switch to using PayPal Express Checkout instead. Your customers get the same benefits, except the communications from PayPal to your site is immediate and not subject to interruptions like Standard is.

or
b) you can do your own troubleshooting to fix the PayPal communications problems yourself. http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

We recommend using Express Checkout instead, since it's more reliable.

i am having a similar issue with my 1.5x i just upgraded 2 websites to ssl so i can take credit cards. orders used to come to the proper e-mail address for the websites. since the ssl they are coming to the main website and not the 2 sites they should be coming from.

is this a setting from the payment server? if so i know what to do, contact the payment processor to fix it.

Thanks so much, this fixed the issue.

DrByte:

You said this no-email-and-no-order phenomenon occurs only with PayPal payments, right?

Is it correct that you're using PayPal Payments Standard? If so, what you describe is common, and is a result of PayPal's servers being unable to tell your server about the new order.

You have basically two options:
a) Switch to using PayPal Express Checkout instead. Your customers get the same benefits, except the communications from PayPal to your site is immediate and not subject to interruptions like Standard is.

or
b) you can do your own troubleshooting to fix the PayPal communications problems yourself. http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

We recommend using Express Checkout instead, since it's more reliable.

I specialise in matchbox labels and similar ephemera. It took a number of months of hard work to build and upload over 2,500 labels to my store. Most of my labels are single items with WIGIG (When its gone its gone). I have been using Zen Cart for over 5 years but have never had the experience that I had today. My new store went live today and a customer who has been waiting in the wings for weeks attempted to purchase in one transaction 258 labels. PayPal processed 99 of the 258, notified me by email but did not post to the new orders area on the main admin page (as reported above by starrysky). However, I had set my system to get PayPal to list the ordered and paid for labels so at least I had a record of the sale albeit on the PayPal web site. However, because the order did not come back to the store "unable to tell my server" the labels are still listed as in stock and I have got to manually change the details to Out of Stock!! It then processed another 99 labels again with the same result but the last 60 went through correctly. When I discussed this with PayPal they laid the blame firmly in Zen Carts lap. My initial question to Dr Byte - although I expect you have indirectly given me the answer already is: Is there a ceiling to the number of items that can be purchased in one transaction as, on 2 occasions the system balked at 99 but went through at 60? If the system is unlimited, will express checkout cope with transactions in the hundreds? - Thank you in advance

You don't say if you're using Paypal Standard or Paypal Express, nor what Zen Cart version you're using.

Hi,
I was using PayPal Standard and Version 1.5.1. However, I found an article which hit the nail on the head. I have now changed to express checkout and fingers crossed all seems well. However, I put in a very negative survey to PayPal when they requested feedback especially as they blamed the ZenCart software. Thanks for responding.