Delay between eStore and PayPal

[TBucketPlans.com]

Today, we had 4 customers who contacted us saying they had paid but had not received their download link. They had purchased yesterday and this morning none of the four appeared in the eStore Manage Customers Menu (they had paid via PayPal as much as 10-12 hours previously — and I just heard from another one tonight that ordered two days ago). I used the Admin function to manually generate download links for these people and then about an hour or two later they finally showed up in the Manage Customers Menu. This is rather frustrating and confusing and, coincidentally, we recently set up a Thank You page to avoid possible email delays. Is there a root cause or is this just some server hiccup? Thanks.

P.S. I also have the apostrophe problem in response emails and understand you have a fix for that.

[amin007]

The root cause is one of the following:

1) PayPal is taking long to send the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to your server (this is most likely the case).

2) Your server is taking long to send the emails.

This usually doesn’t happen all the time but sometimes PayPal can take long to send the IPN. The WP eStore plugin won’t send out the download links unless it receives the payment confirmation from PayPal. Settings up the links on the “Thank You” page is a good alternative for this.

I have sent you the fix for the apostrophe problem.

[amin007]

Just posting it here for anyone who might be seeing the same result:

In checking the PayPal account it showed the IPNs we did not receive as “retrying” and with the notification URL of

[http://www.tbucketplans.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-cart-for-digital-products/paypal.php]

HTTP response code was 408

What is 408?

408 – Request timeout – The client did not produce a request within the time that the server was prepared to wait. The client may repeat the request without modifications at any later time.

Basically PayPal is trying to send the IPN but because the server is under heavy load it’s not accepting it so it’s putting it in the queue to try it later. I haven’t seen many of these but this is likely to happen on a shared hosting where the hosting company has put too many clients on one machine and the server is always under heavy load.

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