I made a client’s store live in August, and since launching we’ve had an issue where some admin notification emails simply aren’t being sent. The orders get recorded, the payment goes through (paypal standard, satan’s gateway) but no email gets sent. So he’s occassionally getting irate phone calls from people wondering where their orders are.

The status of the orders is ‘processing’, but there are loads of emails with that status and most of them still sent an admin email. So far we’ve had three that haven’t and I can’t figure out why not. It’s not a field parsing issue as I’ve checked orders that successfully emailed with the ones that didn’t against each other and there’s nothing that could be making it happen there as far as I can see.

Is there anything that could be happening at the paypal end that could affect this? If they click away or close their browser before being returned to the site (ie on the paypal page that says ‘returning you in 5 seconds…’), would the email not be sent? Can I do anything about this?

Paul B - 17 September 2010 11:41 AM

Is there anything that could be happening at the paypal end that could affect this? If they click away or close their browser before being returned to the site (ie on the paypal page that says ‘returning you in 5 seconds…’), would the email not be sent? Can I do anything about this?

I think that might be what’s happening. I need to check with Chris to know for sure, but I think that without that redirect, CartThrob won’t know that the payment was made and the order is complete.

I would say add another email to the notification (like yours) and see if both emails are not getting the orders. If that’s the case then we know it’s not an email delivery issue.

Thanks Rob. It’s not an email delivery issue, there are three recipients (I’m one of them) on different networks, and we either all get the email or none of us do.

Hi Rob / Chris - any ideas on this one?

If the user doesn’t make it back from paypal then the email is not sent by the system. With all of the offsite payment methods items like this are always a possibility, paypal’s super slow IPN just makes it worse though. We could send the email when the IPN hits but that might not be for days. Basically this comes down to a systems design problem; we’ve tried to make the system work optimally in the largest number of situations, but it’s not always ideal. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Hmm. Posting when the IPN comes through might be a better solution, as right now sometimes there’s no email alert to a purchase at all. Having said this, I don’t think the IPN is working for my setup at all(!) as probably 75% of the purchases still have the status ‘processing’ even after the successful payment email has come from paypal… arg! I’m trying to convince the client to use a different method of handling transactions as paypal standard simply doesn’t seem up to the job.

Well, Paypal is difficult to configure. And I can’t vouch for their IPN system. I know that sometimes they do shut it off if they’ve sent to many notifications to a dead URL.

I never, ever, ever recommend Paypal for merchants. Their system’s architecture runs reverse of what makes sense for non-auction merchants. That and they’re merchant hostile (they’ll lock up accounts based on a customer complaint) So what I’m saying is, by all means convince them to go with another solution. I’ve written CartThrob to work closely with Paypal and their system, but it just takes a lot of work to get it all to work together well. Some of what needs to be done is out of my hands, and some things are just screwed up by Paypal.

I’ll be happy to work with you on it to see what’s going on, but I agree… Paypal standard isn’t really up to the job of working with a merchant efficiently.

Do you find this to still be the case?  I have a client with the same issues.  Some email notifications are not received, despite the orders being placed. She’s using Paypal exclusively as a payment processor.  She’s using EE 1.7x and CT for EE1. Thought maybe it might’ve been addressed, so I’m making sure I’m not using a version that should be upgraded.

Thank you!

Well, you can always upgrade. It doesn’t hurt. We’ve continued to refine the PayPal integration, depending on your version of CT1, there may be some important fixes. One key thing to keep in mind with PayPal is that order notifications are only sent when the payment is confirmed by PayPal, and the system is updated with this confirmation. This can sometimes take up to a week. That said though, there are still things we’ve done to make the system better where we can, keeping that limitation in mind.