Emails not beint sent to customer and to us when a new order is placed.

[futurity]

Our client is using Paypal as their payment service provider but they are experiencing missing notification emails and their customers are also missing order receipts.

Once the customer has placed the order, they arrive at a PayPal receipt page. This automatically sends off a PayPal receipt to the customer and a PayPal one to the site owner.

However, there is no email sent from the actinic site to the customer or a notification of new order to our client unless the customer clicks on the “Return to merchant” button . This is a big problem for our client as their customers are complaining that they haven’t had an email receipt from them.

From personal experience, whenever we’ve paid for online goods, we’ve closed the browser tab or window once the order has been placed and not returned to the merchant site as we have no more shopping to do with them.

Are we correct in thinking that this behaviour will result in email receipts never being sent from our client’s site to their customers, or is our site broken?

Is there anyway that we can get the PayPal site to jump automatically back to the merchants site to set off the automated email or another way to trigger this action? We can see in Paypal that you can set an auto jump URL but being that each “Return to merchant” URL is unique, we can’t see how this can be used?

Thanks in advance.

Neil

[guccij]

This is very, very common with PayPal, numerous threads talk about this.

In the absence of a way of forcing the customer to hit the button to return to your client's site, the best solution would seem to be that your client sends a custom email receipt to the customer and to themselves (if required) when they download the order into Actinic.

[Darren B]

search is an amazing thing this is a common problem and no fix, people have tried telling customers to bounce back but they dont

i have suggested the email be triggered by the server recieving the call back from the psp

[futurity]

Sad to hear that this has been a problem for soo long.

I assume that PayPal calls back a cgi-bin function to tell Actinic that the payment was successfully received. Is there a reason why the Actinic developers can send the receipt and order notification emails from this same cgi-bin function?

Neil

[Darren B]

the only problem is the ones that dont use a call back, things like sending a cheque in the post not sure how this would work

[PatchworkRabbit]

I have this problem. I placed a test order using my paypal account and got a paypal email (as it's my PSP) but nothing from Actinic. Doesn't seem to be anything untoward in the error.err file...

[Mike Hughes]

As the thread says, the email is triggered when the customer returns to the actinic receipt page. If they don't return then the email isn't sent.

The problem is particularly bad with paypal because they don't make it obvious that customers should return to your website.

I discussed this yesterday with Actinic and there's no sign that this will change in V10.

Mike

[PatchworkRabbit]

As the thread says, the email is triggered when the customer returns to the actinic receipt page. If they don't return then the email isn't sent.

The problem is particularly bad with paypal because they don't make it obvious that customers should return to your website.

I discussed this yesterday with Actinic and there's no sign that this will change in V10.

Mike

Ah, I see. It's not too much of an issue, because you do get the mail from Paypal, but I'm also signing up with RBS Worldpay (Gateway Plus). They send an email, too, right?

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't used worldpay, but they should send a payment email like all the other PSPs do.

The customer should really get the order email though as it lists what they've ordered and confirms all the contact details. Unfortunately, the way it's done in Actinic right now is far from ideal.

From my discussions with Actinic yesterday, I gather the callback status is more generally available in V10 as it's being used for the RT stock control. They ought to be able to use this to also trigger the customer email sometime in the future and it would be nice to see this implemented as it's one of the basic features underlying the customer experience when they order.

Mike

[PatchworkRabbit]

As the thread says, the email is triggered when the customer returns to the actinic receipt page. If they don't return then the email isn't sent.

The problem is particularly bad with paypal because they don't make it obvious that customers should return to your website.

I discussed this yesterday with Actinic and there's no sign that this will change in V10.

Mike

During my tests, the Actinic mail doesn't go, even if I click the return to site link.

[Mike Hughes]

During my tests, the Actinic mail doesn't go, even if I click the return to site link.

1. Do you get at the Receipt Page? This should trigger the email.
2. What happens when you run a network test? Any error messages?
3. Can you send emails from actinic? (select an order, try to send an email from actinic but change the email address to one of your own. Try sending to both the email address set up in actinic and onother external one such as gmail).

Mike

[robmob]

Would it also be reasonable to assume this would also affect analytics?

Having encountered the same issue with the emails I have just looked at my analytics for yesterday and especially the goal funnel and e-commerce transactions and sure enough I am light on total transactions by the same number as paid by paypal.

I was particularly looking at the funnel to see where the drop offs were occuring - however I now realise this could be sending me down a blind alley as the figures are not being accurately reported and significantly skewing the analytics and thus potentially the decisions we make in our business.

Regards

[Mike Hughes]

Would it also be reasonable to assume this would also affect analytics?

Yes. Customers not returning to the receipt page will affect analytics where the receipt page is set as the goal.

If actinic changes the trigger for the email to the payment callback then it would solve the email problem but not the analytics one. For accurate analytics you need the customer to return to the receipt page.

Paypal can be set to automatically return the customer to a page on your website after paying. I haven't looked into this but I would think you can set this to be the receipt page (as long as you're only taking paypal payments for a single site).

Mike

[Darren B]

Paypal can be set to automatically return the customer to a page on your website after paying. I haven't looked into this but I would think you can set this to be the receipt page (as long as you're only taking paypal payments for a single site).

Mike

This was something i had intended to look at some time although the biggest problem is paypal does not make enough of returning to the sellers website.

Its about time they made there payment pages more customisable, these days i notice company logos dont seem to show on payment pages either.

i have a couple and in preview mode there fine but when you make a payment the logo does not appear, i noticed this with a couple of companies i brought from recenlty aswell.

[oldcelt]

This was something i had intended to look at some time although the biggest problem is paypal does not make enough of returning to the sellers website.

Its about time they made there payment pages more customisable, these days i notice company logos dont seem to show on payment pages either.

i have a couple and in preview mode there fine but when you make a payment the logo does not appear, i noticed this with a couple of companies i brought from recenlty aswell.

Assuming your paypal account is a business one and you're setting up Website Payments Standard then:

The Paypal payment page can be customised with the client's logo. Go to your paypal account, click on Profile then select Custom Payment Page Styles. From there you can edit the appearance.

To automatically return, see 'Profile>Website Payment Preferences' and turn on Auto Return.

If you have only one site using this particular account then you can set IPN (instant payment notification) on - 'Profile>Instant Payment Notification Preferences'. There you can set the return URL so it returns to your final processing page.

If using more than one site to access the same paypal account then other sites will need to pass the return URL for IPN in the variable "notify_url" (see https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1332). This will overwrite the URL setup in Profile for each transaction but leave the Profile address as default. Also the other sites will need to pass the return address in the variable "return".

Hope this helps,
Ken