PayPal Issue

Hi All,

A client of mine is having difficulty with their PayPal module as it literally just stopped appearing as a payment option after over 1 year of being live. My feeling is that the hosting company made changes to their backend which affected the path mapping and has thus caused the PayPal module to fail. Short of re-installing the entire cart system, is there anyway to re-install a 'clean' PayPal module to start fresh?

Hopefully that was clear, and you help is appreciated!

Have you tried simply uninstalling and reinstalling PayPal from the admin? That may reset anything causing any problems.

What version of ZC is running?

As of 8/23/2007 Paypal is not working for us. We are directed to paypal to log in, do so, complete the transaction, and are returned to our site with the completed order process. We have not changed any of our configurations, and we are running 1.2.7. I have all of the latest pactches up through 1.2.7. The order does not show up on zen-cart, and we what we see when we are redirected back to our site is the last order we completed. Again, we did not change anything in zen-cart as far as paypal and we certainly did not change anything in paypal. As such, I checked the paypal settings per the wiki and everything looked ok. The transaction show up in paypal, but nothing shows up in zen. Is anyone else experiencing any issues like this? Is there a way to debug this as to see where the error is coming from?

Sorry to bump.

In my Apache error log, I am getting the following.

'[Thu Aug 30 03:43:27 2007] [error] [client 24.183.204.133] File does not exist: /home/www/shopping/ipn_main_handler.php&zenid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'.

This looks wrong due to the '&'. I believe that Paypal is doing this, and the '&' should be '?'.

Question I have is when does the order show up when using Paypal, as soon as confirm is clicked on the checkout page, or when Paypal accesses ipn_main_handler.php? Thanks.

What do you have here?

\includes\modules\payment\paypal\paypal_functions.php(332)
$address = HTTP_SERVER . DIR_WS_CATALOG . 'ipn_main_handler.php?' . $postdata;

The "?" gets appended in the code

Alo, you might want to checkout the section " Things to check if it's not working" here
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

You might want to ask your hosting service if they have changed anything recently and seriously consider upgrading to v1.3.7.1 to have the latest and greatest Zen Cart code available.

Thanks for the response. superprg, I am using 1.2.7 thus the first suggestion is not applicable. I have looked at the wiki and checked everything to make sure. Kim, I would love to upgrade, but I have a heavily modded site, and have been hoping I wouldn't have to upgrade.

If you could answer when the order is actually created when using Paypal, that would be a start for me. Thanks.

The moment you get redirected to paypal site, an order is created at the site with pending status and when you come back to the shop after making payment, it gets updated with processing

Heavy modded how? If you have used the overrides properly it should not be horrible. Your biggest headache is the templates - we moved from tabled layout to nearly tableless in 1.3+

Kim I wanted functionality not available at the time so I added it, templates, code you name it. I quite like what I have now and know I am in for a dreaded time when I do have to upgrade. Check the site and you will immediately see what I am talking about. I integrated with phpbb amongst other things. Wishlist, menu at the top, etc. http://www.scrapsupply.com/shopping/index.php I have been using Zen-Cart for 3 years now, and when I started, although I am a programmer, I knew nothing about PHP. I have also made alot of template changes. Anyway, my desire it to continue to use what I have until it's absolutely impossible to go on. The announcement that PHP 5.2 will be the minimum requirement has me concerned as the phpbb I use it not compatible. I am in no way complaining, just giving you some info.

Ok, my order is not getting created, so that may be my issue entirely. The paypal parts seems to go without a hitch, so I will look there. Thanks again.

john.white:

If you could answer when the order is actually created when using Paypal, that would be a start for me. Thanks.

superprg:

The moment you get redirected to paypal site, an order is created at the site with pending status and when you come back to the shop after making payment, it gets updated with processing

That's not entirely correct.

For PayPal IPN, which v1.2.7 uses, the PayPal order is "saved" by archiving a snapshot of the customer's shopping session. The customer is sent to PayPal to make payment. Then, the PayPal server sends an IPN notice to your store to notify of the completed transaction ... via the ipn_main_handler script. If the transaction information matches a transaction that's been archived, it is resurrected and the order is then added to your Zen Cart orders with the appropriate status.
If that IPN process happens within the 10 seconds it takes to bring the customer back to your store, then the new order number will show. If not, they'll see the number of their most recent order prior to this one.

So ... the key is ... make sure that the IPN communications is working properly. That's the cause of 98% of all PayPal order processing problems. And in most cases it's a result of communication issues caused by your webserver itself.

One way to aid in testing IPN communications, in addition to the suggestions in the wiki, is to use this tool:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65680

As an aside, and while understanding your reasons for using it, technically v1.2.7 is officially no longer supported. Planning an upgrade is probably a prudent thing to do...

Thank you to everyone for posting responses. I had figured out what Dr.Byte just explained and can see the stuck paypal orders with the mod he contributed. I am really unsure as to what the issue is because since last night, I have had two paypal checkouts. I am using IPN btw. The first order can through just fine. The second order did not, but there is a paypal transaction for it. I had not changed a line of code between the two checkouts. Now that I understand how it works, it would appear possible that after paying, if the user does not let paypal redirect to our site (i.e. close browser, go to another page) the order would be stuck. I can recover the carts now thanks to Dr.Byte's mod. I am going to leave paypal on, and I will continue to post here in hopes that it could help someone. I am going to run the ipncheck.php script. I will let you know the results.

John

Result of ipncheck.php

IPNCHECK.PHP - Version 1.0

IPN TESTING - POSTING to PayPal via: ssl://www.paypal.com:443

IPN TESTING - Confirmation/Validation response: RESPONSE RECEIVED - Communications OKAY

Script finished.

Sorry to bump again.

As far as
"As an aside, and while understanding your reasons for using it, technically v1.2.7 is officially no longer supported. Planning an upgrade is probably a prudent thing to do...".

My concern is that Zen-Cart will again change so significantly as it did after 1.2.7. If it's not going to change significantly (I mean the backend, templates not the features) then I would be inclined to get in gear. Any ideas on future changes?

Every major release has MAJOR changes, including new features, better security, more easily changed templates.

I dont know what version of phpbb you are using but 2 works with php5 just not officially suported

Thanks again for the replies. I am using 2.0.22 of phpbb. Since starting this thread, I have had only the one order that didn't come through to the store. However I used the stuck paypal orders (enhanced a little to get the product name) to retrieve the order. I have had 5 or 6 paypal orders that have come through just fine. It's starting to look like just a glitch in the communications.