Phantom Orders: Not Registered in Zen Cart, PayPal OK

We recently had 5 phantom orders go through Zen Cart, that showed up ok in PayPal. All of the funds came through fine in PayPal, but there was no sign of any of the orders in Zen Cart. No order numbers, no inventory reduction, no transaction notification to the admin through Zen Cart, nothing! 4 of the orders happened on one day and then 1 order happened 4 days later. Orders went through the system perfectly fine between that time and everything has been fine since. We are using the following:

Zen Cart 1.3.6
Database Patch Level: 1.3.6
PHP Version 4.4.7

If anyone has any ideas please let us know as we don't really have any answer for our client, and we'd like to be able to prevent this in the future. Thanks!

Have you thought about upgrading?

Are you talking about upgrading Zen Cart to 1.3.7? Is this phantom order a common problem in 1.3.6? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just wondering why you think that might be the cause. Thank you!

If you're using the PayPal IPN module, then you're totally reliant on PayPal's servers sending notice back to your server when payment has been received.

If PayPal's servers fail for some reason, or if the communication is blocked for any reason, or if you've installed a new mod that changes some preliminary load code, then the release of orders could remain blocked.

PayPal has reported a few system problems in the last couple weeks.
http://www.pdncommunity.com/blog?blog.id=mts_updates

If you are having repeated problems, then perhaps your server's configuration has been changed, or your hosting company's firewall or network config has been altered.

Some things to check if the problem is persistent:
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/PayPal

I have been having similar problems intermittently for the past couple of weeks (seems to correspond to the dates on PayPal's status blog: http://www.pdncommunity.com/blog?blog.id=mts_updates). Of course, PayPal seems to show the IPN issues as resolved, but I just had another one today!

During that period, around 10% of my PayPal orders have not been recorded in Zen Cart. Because 90% of them are being recorded correctly, the problem does seem to be what Dr. Byte is describing (ie, problems with PayPal servers and/or communications between Zen Cart & PayPal). It is frustrating because there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. It is also a pain to recreate the orders for the customer.

I am not planning to switch in the near future to PayPal Express Checkout because I do not like the emphasis that it places on PayPal. My primary form of payment acceptance is Credit Card via Authorize.net. The PayPal Express Checkout module makes it appear that it is the preferred payment method (especially on the login page). I have also been following some of the current glitches in the related forum.

I would, however, like the added benefits of Express (order details in PayPal, no missing order problems), so once it looks more stable I will probably look at implementing it with changes to how it appears in Zen Cart.

Enough rambling :)

Jason
ChristaQuilts.com