Once again - nearly all of my customers are getting timeout errors following timeout:
"There was a timeout waiting for confirmation from the payment server. Please contact our customer service email for details about the status of your order."

Using Paypal Advanced. It does appear everybody is getting an IPN and the orders are going trhough.
Anybody else experiencing this?
I noticed all notification emails from paypal lag the order by 4-5 hours today. But often the order and notification email have the same date and time and still results in an error.
Anybody know what causes this? And how to avoid this (other than changing to Stripe)?

Hi Ekrzycki
Is this something that happens randomly, all the time, or kind of goes in phases where all of a sudden it is happening on all orders but then clears up? The thing is, at times PayPal does have downtime because of maintenance and this can hit the IPN's for instance. It does generally clear up quite soon though. If it is something that happens all the time then it may be a misconfiguration and we can look into it.

Vince

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Usually this is random.
But - starting on the 31st, it became the norm.
Customers continue to get the timeout errors.
And the paypal email notifications are all in the 7 to 8 hour later range.

Hi Ekrzycki
Can you have a look then at your IPN history page to see what the status of the last couple of week's IPN's are. There are details on this page as to how to view...
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNOperations/
Then let us know what you find there.

Vince

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Well... I tried to look up IPN history. The info they provide with IPN history now is rather useless. Searched for all on the 5th which should include the late notifications that occurred all day as well as denied payments. Strange that it says all were done on time and nothing was denied. But not surprising.

Something *magically* fixed itself with Paypal on Thursday. No more timeouts, no more 7-8 hour delays in email confirmations. Could have been something on Servelink but don't know at this point.

That timeout message - what exactly triggers that message? I have seen this timeout message several times before when the payment completed and the payment notification as well as the email from my website were within a minute of each other. The timeout pretty much occurred as soon as the payment was made.

The timeout message will appear if the IPN hasn't arrived within 30 seconds. This is normally plenty enough time for the the IPN to arrive as it normally arrives before the customer gets back to the site.

Vince

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Can't something please be done about this issue?
I have been plagued with this issue for years.
I'll get no errors for several days - and then get hit with a day with loads of them.
And then - the timeouts magically go away again.

With each error occurrence - I am either getting emails asking why they got the error or people placing duplicate orders because they got an error on the first attempt (even though the first attempt works).

This is getting quite frustrating.

Can you maybe send me the times to my email (vince AT ecommercetemplates DOT com) when this has happened in the last month along with access to the server logs for those times and I'll have a look to see what I can find.

Vince

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Hi Vince,

Just checking to see if you got my email.

Thanks, Ed

Hi Ed
Yes, I got the log files and sorry for not getting back to you but it's quite a tricky problem and needed a bit of digging. I can see the trail now in the logs of a failed order. For instance, one came in at ...

2020-09-16 15:12:57 W3SVC35 draconis 204.140.21.20 GET /thanks.asp

The system then attempts to get the order confirmation...

2020-09-16 15:12:59 W3SVC35 draconis 204.140.21.20 GET /vsadmin/ajaxservice.asp action=ipnarrived&oid=
...and this goes on till 30 seconds later...
2020-09-16 15:13:30 W3SVC35 draconis 204.140.21.20 GET /vsadmin/ajaxservice.asp action=ipnarrived&oid=

...and then finally the IPN arrives here...
2020-09-16 15:14:22 W3SVC35 draconis 204.140.21.20 POST /vsadmin/ppconfirm.asp

So this is the problem that as in this case the IPN is arriving 1:25 seconds after the order was made. This isn't normally the case and when there are technical glitches and IPN's are delayed we hear about it on the forum, but it's not that common. Normally the IPN arrives before, or just a couple of seconds behind the order. If you say this is happening a lot then maybe one thing we could do is increase the time that the system will continue checking for the IPN to 2 minutes. Would that be a solution do you think? Another thing that may help is to change the message that the customer receives in this situation to let them know the order has been received but you are waiting for the PayPal confirmation.

Vince


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Hopefully increasing the delay to 2 minutes will catch the majority.
I think being able to edit the error message would also help but I'm at a loss for what to add to the error message. The original error message is correct but I think more info is needed - I get a few people that consider this message to be a failed order and will try again resulting in duplicate orders.

Would having the ability to completely disable this error message do the trick? Does the customer really need to know this? Maybe just send the error message to the store owner?

Thanks, Ed

Hi Ed
Sorry for the delay in replying, but to sort this out just open the file...
vsadmin/inc/incthanks.asp
...in notepad and search for...
setTimeout('checkipnarrived()',1000);
...and change that to...
setTimeout('checkipnarrived()',4000);
The trouble with not displaying the error message is that then means that you would be displaying the receipt page. But really you don't have any idea if the customer has paid or not until the IPN arrives. A declined transaction would also result in a successful receipt with the customer expecting goods to be shipped.

Vince

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Had a few occurrences of the timeout error on the 29th.
Updated incthanks on the 30th.
I'll see if this does the trick.
Thanks, Ed

Unfortunately - the first order after applying this change resulted in the timeout error.
We got the email regarding payment notification at about 9:29 last night. And we got the website generated email regarding an order was received at about 9:34.
Can't seem to download the log file this morning so can't check that.

Hi Ed
I'm sorry to hear that but 5 minutes would be a really long time to wait. Could you maybe work out some text that indicates that the order has been received, is being processed and to check their email inbox for the transaction receipt?

Vince

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Set delay back to 2000.
Revised note applied to xxPPTOUT to contact us only if a payment confirmation is not received. Still working on actual verbage.