No evidence of order

Hello all

I set up a site to try out Contao, and left it up and running. Bizarrely, I got a sale through it, though it was not really meant for production.

However, the only way I know I have a sale is via the PayPal notification email. There seems to be no evidence of the order in the Contao/Isotope back end.

Can anyone point me towards how this could have happened, and what I should be doing to fix it?

Thanks

Tom

Tom,

normally you will see orders in the 'Orders' screen in the backend.
If an order does not show up there this could be due to the user not returning to your isotope shop after paying via paypal.
The paypal order is only finalized after returning to your shop.

If you like to recover your order, quickly go to your database (using e.g. phpMyadmin) and check the tl_iso_orders table.
In that table you might find an order with the id field the same as in your paypal confirmation but with an empty status field.
Change the status field to 'pending' and the order will show in your backend.
Please make a new test order after handling this order - I am not sure what will happen afterwards with this order ID...

If you are too late, the order ID may already have been used again by a next order. That order will then also contain a "payment date" which may be the date of the paypal payment of your previous order.
IMHO this is a bug that stops me from using paypal. Orders may get lost or even overwritten after payment has been made...

When setting up a test site for Isotope I'd recommend to tick the "debug mode" field in your paypal payment module. That way you can test payments using paypal's sandbox without actually capturing real payments.
It also helps to name your shop "demo-store" ;)

Rob

Thanks for all the detail, Rob. I can see the order: what are valid values for "status"?

Tom

Tom,

Valid values are: pending, processing, complete, on_hold and cancelled.

as far as I know there is no coded workflow in Isotope to use these values in a certain way so you have to define a use for these yourself.
I have one shop that I am working on together with a colleague and we just made some agreements on how to use the different values for the status; we set the status to complete on shipment of the products and only use processing for those orders that we have to prepare (e.g. cut to size or machine), on hold I use for orders that are ready to ship but are awaiting payment.

Regards,

Rob

So why is Isotope not setting status to either "pending" or "processing" (or some other value) before breaking out to PayPal? Having no status at all at that point seems mistaken, surely?

Tom

I agree.
At this moment Isotope leaves this up to the payment module.
In the Ideal module (online banking/payment system in the Netherlands) this is solved by setting the status to Pending as soon as the bank is being contacted.

In general; as soon as a payment modules refers to an external website (i.e. site of the bank/creditcard company/paypal/postfinance/..) with a payment request the order should be 'fixed'.
The paypal website shows a payment request for a given order number but if something goes wrong (e.g. customer does not return to the Isotope shop) the order is not 'fixed' and the order number can be re-used for another order.

And yes: I think this is wrong and it is a major bug (stopping me to use paypal)
Still, I am not too concerned about this.

I have looked into the paypal system a bit: they want me to allow them to charge my bank account or credit card for all transactions they seem fit. Transactions are only protected by my username (email address) and a password.
This would allow anyone who could break in at paypal or who stole my password to empty my bank account :o
I am not sure about the USA but in Europe this not acceptable. I'd rather use a bank transfer myself (which is free of charge if I use a SWIFT/BIC code)
Sorry ... this is a bit of a personal frustration ... I still see customers who think that credit card payment by fax is less secure that paypal ...

Rob

OK, Isotope leaves the setting of the status to the payment module, but does the PayPal payment module not ship with Isotope? In other words, who maintains the Paypal payment module?

To me, this is not a matter of opinion, but just a plain bug, and I would have thought one which is easily fixed. Who maintains the Isotope Paypal module?

Tom