Empty order

[roobyroo]

Hey guys, I wonder if anyone has come across this problem before. I have an order on my system (which the customer has paid for in full via paypal) yet there doesn't appear to be anything in the order and it shows that no payment has been received. Another strange thing is that the order date is 01/01/1970.

I have absolutely no idea what the customer was wishing to purchase or has paid for. Is this a glitch in Bluepark or something?

Is there any way to find out what the order should have been for before the embarrassment of contacting the customer?

John
Character Planet.co.uk (http://www.characterplanet.co.uk)

[Andrew]

Yes, we had a few of these now, I have raised it with Rich but we can't seem to find an explanation.

The last one we had a couple of days ago came from a guy that was using an Apple Mac/Safari Browser, but I am not sure whether that has any relevance!.

We simply have to re-process the order for these odd few, which can be a bit embarrasing.

Andy

[roobyroo]

Hi Andy, how did you rectify it? Did you contact the customer to find out exactly what it was that they ordered and then manually enter the details into the order number that has been generated for them?

[Jelly]

Hi

I have had a couple of these too. I was going to post a message about it yesterday but got distracted.

Both my orders have been through google checkout and I have had two orders from each of the customers. One with the complete order fully paid and a seperate empty order coming up with the date as 01/01/1970. So I have just ignored the empty ones.

All orders that have gone through the bluepark checkout system have been fine.

I assumed it was a google checkout problem? Maybe not!?

Karen

[roobyroo]

I was going to ignore the empty order that I received too that was also dated 01/01/1970 but it was purely by accident that I stumbled across a stray payment in my Paypal account so looked into it to try and match it up to an order.

I think I'm going to have to contact the customer and apologise and ask what it was that he had ordered. Not very professional though :-s

[Andrew]

As far as the payment gateway is concerned the last order we had of this type was via Protx, we had to contact the customer to verify the order.

Andy

[Rich]

I have absolutely no idea what the customer was wishing to purchase or has paid for. Is this a glitch in Bluepark or something?

This is an exceptionally rare occurrence, I'm looking at your order at the moment. Please don't delete or modify it yet, as this is a good test case.

You can, however, find out what your customer has ordered (in this case). View the site as the customer via Remote Control and you can see the contents of their basket.

I'll report back when I have further information on this issue.

[Rich]

Okay, this is - for now - resolved. The reason behind this particular order being empty is that the item was removed from the basket before the order was completed. It is a PayPal order which was completed by the IPN - the Instant Payment Notification that PayPal sends to Bluepark following the purchase.

The customer clearly returned to the site by means other than clicking on the link on the PayPal order confirmation screen. Had they clicked on that link, it would have completed the order for them. Once back on the site, they visited their basket and removed the item they had ordered. This took place before the IPN from PayPal reached the site. Unfortunately, "instant" doesn't always mean "instant" when it comes to PayPal's IPN. The IPN completed the order with no items in the basket - and therefore no items to attribute to the order.

I realise the item is back in the basket now, but I checked the time it was added and it was significantly later than when the order was processed. The customer had probably gotten quite confused by this point!

The same thing can happen with Google Checkout. The customer can return to the site before the callback from Google to confirm the order details. I believe this has happened on some (clearly) very rare occasions. In addition, I found that Google has very occasionally sent the callback twice - triggering a redundant empty order. The possibility of this happening again has now been removed.

Finally, the "1970" date was symptomatic of this - it's actually the default date for a timestamp of zero, it's effectively a bug which has been fixed. No further orders will have a date like this, so the order will at the very least appear prominently in the Order Manager. Such orders will be editable, meaning they will be correctable in terms of adding in the missing items.

I hope that's clear, this was quite a detailed investigation with complex findings. The difficulty remains with respect to protecting the contents of the basket while the order is in "limbo". This is particularly difficult with Google Checkout, as it's literally impossible to know whether the customer is altering the contents of the order before or after making the payment. Until we receive the callback from Google, we simply don't have this information.

Thankfully, IPNs and callbacks from PayPal and Google are generally fairly prompt - which is why this happens so rarely, I believe.

[roobyroo]

Cheers Rich, that really does explain how this could have happened. That sounds really complicated but I've managed to amend the order after finding out exactly what the customer has ordered by viewing the customers account via the remote control so hopefully all is well now.

Thanks again