eStore & PayPal – occasionally receipt shows incorrect postage amount charged

[creativedig]

Hi there guys & girls,

Quite an unusual set of circumstances occurring on a site we created using eStore & eMember. Have searched through the forum but haven’t (yet) found a related problem (sorry if I’ve missed it) so I’m sharing here.

First off, been using eStore and eMember for a while. Great plugins and very happy!

Recently some anomalies have occurred.

Around 1 month ago on three separate (but nearby) occasions orders have been made and processed by PayPal but on the receipt, instead of the correct postage and packaging amount, it has displayed an amount of £20.60. This figure has been identical for all three transactions and is a figure higher than the required postage fee for all three transactions.

I tried to re-create the error several times by adding the same items to the shopping cart that were listed in all 3 transactions and completing the paypal process but each attempt resulted in the transaction going through successfully with the correct postage and packaging amount with no sign of the anomalous £20.60 amount.

So I chalked it up to a glitch.

However, again in the last few days 2 unusual transactions have occurred. On Apr 23rd again a transaction went through without the correct postage & packaging charge which instead was replaced with the figure of £20.60.

Between all transactions with the incorrect postage (£20.60) there is no common link aside from the strange postage amount. i.e. no identical orders, items, discount codes, country of order origin etc. so it is becoming very difficult to pin point the cause of the occasionally occurring error.

Then yesterday (25 Apr) a transaction took place which is very odd for the following reasons:

1 – The postage was incorrect (but this time it was a fee of £15.00 instead of the £20.60 seen in previous anomalous orders)

2 – The prices of the items were incorrect! Several weeks ago the pricing across all items was increased but this transaction which took place after the increase showed the old pricing for the items.

3 – The transaction contained items from the shop and 1 item from the members area. (to elaborate – there are 2 identical shops: 1 with public pricing and 1 with members pricing. the members shop is only accessible via login through eMember. All items are in the same store database but are tagged in different categories with the public products category listed in the freely accessibly shop and the discounted/members category on a protected page. The person who made this purchase is not a site member and does not have access to the members shop and so had no way of viewing and adding the discount version of the item to the basket.

yes, of course it is possible that login details could be passed around but that seems unlikely in this case as only 1 of 3 items was purchased at the discounted rate!

Regarding the setup:

(postage fees are set in the store settings not using pay pals shipping calculator feature as we’re outside of the US)

(I have permission from the site owner to provide the paypal receipts should they be helpful in diagnosing the issue but would prefer not to display them direct in the forum)

(this has not been caused by a WP update or plugin update as neither have occurred during this time)

It seems unlikely that the issue is with the plugin as it has been working excellently until very recently and also if there was a problem I would suspect there would be a constant error instead of a sporadic one.

However I’m not sure how to determine the cause of the problem so help and advice would be very much appreciated on this matter.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read this

[admin]

Hi, Do you have any kind of profile based shipping configured in your PayPal merchant account?

[creativedig]

Thanks for your quick reply I don’t currently have direct access to the paypal account so will go back to the site owner and check and then reply here. I don’t recall any such settings at the time we set up the system but maybe something has changed.

[creativedig]

Hi, I can confirm there are no kinds of profile based shipping configured and active in the PayPal account.

[Peter]

Hi,

Ideally it might be helpful to have a debug capture of a “correct” purchase transaction and one which is exhibiting the incorrect pricing as you described above.

Therefore could you please enable debug and share the output if possible.

Please see this link for how to enable debug:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/how-and-when-to-enable-debug-and-what-does-it-do

[creativedig]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your reply. We’ll enable debug mode and collect the information for sharing here

[creativedig]

Just a quick update. We’re collecting the debug info but all transactions are going through correctly at the moment (which is great!). Maybe it was just a glitch for some reason. We’ll report back here with the debug info if/when an incorrect transaction occurs.

Thanks again

[Author]

Posts