New shop - Intermittent errors

[kevin_miller]

I've been playing with osCommerce for a few months now and have customised MS2.2 to produce http://shop.napiers.net (all comments welcome) which is now live. The site exhibits a couple of intermittent faults which I'd be most grateful for any feedback on.

 

1st fault - Occassionally when browsing in the shop the category navigation on the left hand side will disappear, along with all dynamic content from the database - only the message "The are no products to list in this category" appears in the main window. This happens intermittently in all categories. You'll notice that the Specials infobox also disappears completely from the right hand side when this happens. Everything comes back when refreshing the browser window or navigating away to another page. Anyone experienced something similar?

 

2nd fault - The online shop is is a subdomain and when browsing away from the shop and into the main Napiers website using the navigation buttons at the top of my site the user is then logged out. On return to a shop page they must log in again to order anything. Is there a way to stop that happening i.e. maintain the log in?

 

3rd fault - Intermittently the customer name, billing and shipping addresses are missing on the confirmation email sent to the merchant. I'm using SECPay to do the transaction and 9 times out of ten all works perfectly. 1 time in 10 there is that missing information. Has this happened to anyone else?

[kevin_miller]

I've found out that the missing address details in the order emails (and database table) stems from customers not hitting the "Continue" button on checkout_success.php and therefore concluding the order. If they navigate away or shut down the browser after being returned to checkout_success.php by the payment gateway (SECPay) the name and address details are not written into the database. Going to look at held orders v1b contribution as a method to partially fix this. Any other ideas on how to prevent this happening would be gratefully received.

[Guest]

1) sounds like a DB issue. Have you tried to repair the database?

2) Forcing cookies may help.

3) Might want to try a different payment processor that allows osC to send the payment details via an HTTPS POST or CURL or something like that. Whenever you require the customer to leave your site to pay (PayPal has the same problem) you run the risk of them not returning to the store to finish checkout.

 

For #3, installing the PayPal IPN contrib will help with this, but only for PayPal. Some folks add text to the checkout screen, just prior to sending the customer off to the payment processor's website, saying something like "Your order is not complete until you return to this website to complete it."

 

HTH

 

-jared

[kevin_miller]

Thanks for your advice Jared. Much appreciated!

 

I've looked into the 1st problem in more depth and have come to the conclusion that this behaviour is caused by the code in application_top.php where the language variables are set. This shop only runs in English (and only delivers to UK) so I've removed the code where the php checks the browsers default language and hard coded in the variables I want instead. This seems to have sorted things out - at least on this particular modified installation of osCommerce.

 

Second problem is indeed a cookie based issue.

 

Thanks for coments on the payment gateway stuff. I'll tweak things accordingly.