Confirmation email from payment gateway but no order in admin dashboard?

Hi.

My site is using Zen Cart v 1.5.1 and I encountered something confusing yesterday.

We received an email from our payment authorization gateway about a confirmed/approved credit card transaction, but no Order Confirmation email came through from Zen Cart. When checking on the Dashboard, there is a record of that customer being on the site but no record of a completed order.

What happened here? I don't know how to proceed & verify anything, considering there is no record of a transaction that the payment gateway authorization email already said was confirmed. Confusing...

What payment processor?

stevesh:

What payment processor?

Authorize.net

jb412:

Authorize.net

AIM or SIM

Pretty sure it's SIM

While I am no expert, one of the first things that DrByte would have you do is to enable logging in the Auth.net module being used.

Admin: Modules: Payment: Authorize.net SIM (if green dotted): Edit: last option, debug: Log and email: Update

Process a transaction and then see what the error logfile tells you.

I had an issue with similar symptoms and the problem was traced to a bad entry in the root .htaccess file that was preventing the store from receiving the transaction approval.

The only reason SIM would not store the order is if something went wrong after the customer clicked "pay" and were supposed to be redirected back to your store.

Maybe they closed the browser, and it didn't get a chance to get back to your store?

Maybe it did bring them back to your store, but something on your store triggered a PHP error that halted normal storing of order information, and the customer probably saw an error of a blank white screen ... in which case you'll see the error details in the /logs/ folder as myDebug-xxxxxx.log files. See: http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?124 for explanation of how that works.

Maybe you've got addons/plugins installed that are interfering with normal operation?

Maybe your server has broken redirect rules, as RixStix suggested.

Maybe your hosting company changed things with your server, that you don't know about, and now it's working differently than it did before.

Did you test making a purchase from your own store to see what's actually happening for customers after they make payment?