Paypal is telling me what somone ordered or subtracting it from inventory (IPN)

I have Zen cart Version 1.3.7 and i have just integrated my account with paypal. My web address is www.godlytreasure.com. It appears to be working fine as it allows the transfer to paypal and allows the exchange of money. Then it transfers back to my website and says it was a sucsess. The order does not have an order #, its left blank, but this might be from me turning the feature off too not to sure about the order #. However when i recieve the payment recieved email from paypal it does not contain what they bought, also it seems that zen cart does not recognize the order either. I check in the admin area for orders and Customers and cannot find a place where it shows what has been purchased. The cart is not also subtracting the order from inventory. Most of my items in my store are items that i do not have duplicates of so having two ppl purchase the same items will cause major problems on my end.

I have the latest patch from feb 20th and have read many threads about this same situation happening to many others, but i never found a post with the solution to the problem. If someone could please help me, i would greatly appreaciate it.

That is a problem inherent in the PayPal IPN approach to collecting payment. If your webserver isn't properly configured to receive the IPN notices from PayPal, then the symptoms you describe will be the norm.

Here is a detailed explanation of the process, setup tips, and a list of troubleshooting steps to follow:
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

If it's not working, turn on debug logging and post your log files for analysis.

Note: the current patch is March 02 ...
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56216

Well this is the error report i get from my email.

IPN FATAL ERROR::Could not establish fsockopen. Host Details =
www.paypal.com:80 (111) Connection refused

I assume this means port 80 is not open or something with the firewall is blocking communication. The only thing is i have no idea how to change these settings. your guide says to contact your host. My webhost is Godaddy and i have contacted them twice about this problem and each time they said that they are set up for communication with paypal. They said port 80 and 443 are open. I use filezilla as my ftp program, which there appears to be some firewall setting, but not really sure what i need to do to fix this problem.

Oh the pains of hosting with GoDaddy ...

The Connection refused notice indicates that either GoDaddy's fsockopen() calls are failing to get out the firewall, or the PayPal server is refusing connection to the GoDaddy server you're hosted on.

GoDaddy does use some proxy infrastructure for some external communications, such as CURL.

In Admin->Configuration->My Store, there are two settings for CURL Proxy. You need to enable it, and then ensure that the IP address is set properly. The default address should be fine for GoDaddy.

CURL isn't used for the PayPal IPN module, but ... the IPN module has some rudimentary proxy support and relies on the CURL settings to make it happen.

I'd be curious to see what happens by using that method.

:smartass: Thanks so much!! I got it working, and i appeciate all your help. Plus, I'll be donating once my site gets finished.