Paypal order didn't work using v1.3.0

I just had my first ever customer place an order and pay by paypal...kinda. They signed up in the morning, and in the afternoon, I received a paypal payment email. I've set it up as per the instructions, with the links in paypal and in my paypal module.

My question is, when does the order actually get placed? Is it after they get redirected back to my site? If so, is it possible they prevented this from happening by closing the window, pressing the back button, or somehow not being redirected, or do I need to accept their payment for this to happen?

Thanks,
Lennard
https://www.royalgems.co.nz

Just a thought - my paypal email is different to that of my site - would this have an effect. I'm chaning it now anyway.

Well, the email address used inthe paypal module MUST be the primary email used in paypal.com

that would be the issue

Ok, I've just changed that. I'll get them to place the order again and see what happens.

Scratch that - I just relised the paypal payment module has its own email, which was the same...therefore the problem lies elsewhere. Any ideas?

make sure that its the PRIMARY
and that its case sensitive.

also do you have a URL to look at

yes, the case for the email is the same

the url on the module is https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr
and on my pp account - http://www.royalgems.co.nz/index.php?main_page=checkout_process

It did it again.

Any other ideas? I downloaded the paypal session viewer, but none of the information in there is about the items they ordered.

Does this help?
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

everything I can see so far is fine. All the links are fine and my email is the same. Of course I can't test it because I only have on credit card, so can't sign up for another paypal account to test it with.

Looking at past threads, this has happened plenty of times before, but I can't find a singal post that actually fixes it. Meanwhile, I have a payment in my paypal account that I was not notified about or accepted, yet I can't decline it.

What version of Zen Cart ?

actually royal,
just about every one of these posts has been fixed by using the wiki or the tutorial I created before,

maks eure that you do NOT have
includes/languages/english/your template/meta_tags.php

I'm running v1.3.0

I've tried all I can on the tutorial. The only thing I haven't tried has been the ip block. However, I have tried accessing http://www.royalgems.co.nz/ipn_main_handler.php and get the white screen, so if I understand it correctly, paypal is accessing that ok.

I've found someone with a paypal account, so will get them to test it later on Today.

I alos just recheck checked the urls and now have eight debug message pertaining to the two failed purchases. Here are some quotes.

HEres the 1st one

IPN FATAL ERROR::Transaction did not validate

IPN WARNING::Transaction was not marked as VERIFIED. IPN Info = HTTP/1.1 200 OK

,Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:07:22 GMT

,Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e

,Set-Cookie: cookie_check=yes; expires=Sun, 25-Sep-2016 23:07:23 GMT; path=/; domain=.paypal.com

,Set-Cookie: Apache=210.55.4.23.27638115948484354; path=/; expires=Sat, 20-Sep-36 23:07:22 GMT

,Connection: close

,Transfer-Encoding: chunked

,Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

,

,7

,INVALID

,0

,

IPN INFO - POST VARS
cmd=_notify-validate

IPN FATAL ERROR::No saved session data available

The debug information is only useful if obtained from an actual attempted payment not a "test" hit on ipn_main_handler

They are from 'attempted' payments, not tests, which I only did this morning. The dates they specify are when payments were made. The thing is the payments are working fine, just the orders are not being made. This means I have no way of know what they ordered.