Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.net

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Brandeline
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Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.net

Post by Brandeline »

I've been using Interspire Cart 5.5.4 for two separate storefront since about March of this year and while it wasn't apparent at first, I seem to be losing a lot of sales because customers are having trouble getting their payments to process. (I use Authorize.net as my gateway, as well as Paypal Express)

So I'm wondering, Is anyone else seeing problems where Paypal reports that the transaction cannot be completed, or if the customer tries using a credit card, as soon as they hit the submit button, they end up right back at the checkout page instead of having the cart process their credit card? With the credit cards, I'm not even seeing an attempted transaction in my processing logs, so it looks like Interspire just never sent it to the gateway. Not all of my customers are seeing this, but enough that I'm losing valid sales.

Any ideas on what causes this?
Martin
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by Martin »

It's entirely possible it could be something like shipping details needing to match billing, etc... or poor sanity checking of the data being collected.

As you say though, without seeing any actual data it'd be next to impossible to debug...
novista
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by novista »

Brandeline,

Are your store logs reporting any errors?
Michael Kopel
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Brandeline
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by Brandeline »

When Auth.net actually declines a card, then yes, I'm getting error messages in the logs saying either it was flat declined by the bank, or it was an AVS mismatch, so that's not really the issue I was asking about. At least when that happens I do have some data to follow up on, and I also have an entry in Auth.net's control panel showing that there was an attempt at processing the card. But some customers are filling in their credit card information, clicking submit, and just landing back on the same checkout page without any error message at all (Shown to them or logged in the store logs, or auth.net's logs either.)

With Paypal, usually I get a very vague message in the logs saying the transaction could not be successfully completed, with no details as to why, but one or two customers have also reported being dumped back at the checkout page without any error message when using Paypal too.

I thought maybe it was a browser compatibility issue, but as I'm gathering information on what browsers and OS's customers are using, I'm seeing reports from browser/OS combinations I'm running on at least one computer here with and not seeing the issue.

I should probably mention we're using the one page checkout.
novista
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by novista »

For the Paypal transactions, can you tell if the customer is checking out as a guest or with an account?
Michael Kopel
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Martin
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by Martin »

I'm thinking about the only way to deal with this is to have a custom function to log all the transaction data (well, as much as possible without hitting PCI issues) into a text file so you can look back over what was sent/received.

It does sound a lot like it could be a cached file, template or something else "odd" that isn't rearing its head properly...

Also, wondering if it's something like a specific country, county or way of inputting/formatting the data that's causing the problem... Certainly the lack of any actual error data seems mighty odd...
CharlieFoxtrot
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Re: Problems with payments not processing - Paypal and Auth.

Post by CharlieFoxtrot »

Here are some random bits of information that helped me to debug and increase the reliability of my payment processor, Virtual Merchant (Elavon). Perhaps there will be something in here that will help you.

In ISC 4.07, the cart would send a ten-character zip code (ie: 23666-4567) including the dash. But VM would only accept a 9 digit (digits only) zip code. So, I modified the code automatically trim the zip code to just 5 digits. (I suppose I could have done a global replace on the the string instead.)

VM has a 30 character limit for address lines. So, before sending VM the address data, I trim it down to 30 characters. (It was very rare that this happened, but just once is too many times.)

VM expects the total to be in the following format ###.## (two decimal places) but ISC was sending the total in this format ###.#### (four decimal places). Even though the last two digits were always "00", VM didn't like it and reported an error. (I think this may have been fixed for the VM module in subsequent versions... but a similar error might exist in other modules.)

Okay, that's it. I don't know if this will fix your specific problem... but it may give you some ideas to explore (and find) other areas that could be causing your errors.

Good luck!

~ Charlie
ISC 4.0.7

"... and let's be honest that whole "by design" thing is getting old too."
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