Paypal: Lost orders?

[hornsea]

Hi

I would like to ask a favour :)

 

This is my issue

When a customer orders with paypal they are redirected across to the paypal secure site and do the credit card stuff. fine so far.

 

then they are sent back to my site and the order is written to file and order confirmation is sent out.

 

That appears to work very well in most cases but in around 1 in 25 orders, only the paypal reciept is received by me and no order is written in the system.

 

This indicates that the user never got back to the site for the system to complete the process. Is this a common error?

Is it

a) error by users

b) system problem or known bug

 

I wonder if the order could be written before we go to paypal system, that way at least we would have the ability to see what had been ordered.

 

Sorry to be a nuisance

 

also What is the difference between paypal IPN and the paypal module that ships with oscommerce?

 

Steve Elliott

[wheeloftime]

Hi

I would like to ask a favour :)

 

This is my issue

When a customer orders with paypal they are redirected across to the paypal secure site and do the credit card stuff. fine so far.

 

then they are sent back to my site and the order is written to file and order confirmation is sent out.

 

That appears to work very well in most cases but in around 1 in 25 orders, only the paypal reciept is received by me and no order is written in the system.

 

This indicates that the user never got back to the site for the system to complete the process. Is this a common error?

Is it

a) error by users

B) system problem or known bug

 

I wonder if the order could be written before we go to paypal system, that way at least we would have the ability to see what had been ordered.

 

Sorry to be a nuisance

 

also What is the difference between paypal IPN and the paypal module that ships with oscommerce?

 

Steve Elliott

 

It is not a nuisance but the question has been asked so many times that you should be able to find your answer very quickly. In fact you already have it with the Paypal IPN as the main difference with the stock Paypal module is that it writes the order into the database before the customer is sent to Paypal. This has also a disadvantage though as sometimes a customer does not pay for an order in the end and you have an obsolete order (the counterpart of not having one at all :D ).

Besides that a simple contribution like Master Password in combination with the Order Editor contribution can do the trick also if you have only very few customers not returning to your site.

 

HTH