Downloads - Is this a PayPal, Browser, Host-Server or Actinic problem?

[PA.com]

Namely that a good proportion of my customers are complaining that they have problems receiving their MP3 downloads from my site.

It's got a bit silly really, whenever I see a order for a download has come through, I'm fully expecting one of the 2 following problems to crop up, and about 50% of the time my fears are realised! I'm sure these problems shouldn't occur, perhaps other digital download users could let me know if these are in fact regular problems that I can't do anything about (apart from emailing the files directly to my customers with a sheepish apology).

Can anyone help identify where the culprit lies? Does it sound like PayPal (my current PSP) isn't authorising the transaction correctly and sending the wrong variables back? Or could these be recognised problems that affect non-IE browsers? Or is my web-hosters' server behaving suspiciously? Finally, could it be a possible bug in Actinic Catalog Version 7.0.2 that I'm using?

Anyhow, the problems are these:

1) Some customers complain that the download links simply aren't appearing on their receipt page or automated email. It seems to happen randomly - in one instance, a few days ago, a customer bought one MP3 file and received the link ok, then 10 minutes later she bought another (using the same details and procedure) and there were no links this time.

2) Other customers complain that they can only receive for example 30% of their downloads before the download process just stops. I guess this may sound like a web-hosting issue, but I have bought well over 100 test purchases from my site (on different computers) and never had a failure when downloading. I refuse to believe its just a coincidence that my host-server times out only when my customers use it and not me.

Thanks a million for any help. If anyone goes way beyond the call of duty and makes a test purchase, of course I'll refund any monies!

Paul Gardner
www.piano-accompaniments.com

[Krithika]

Hi Paul

This does sound odd. A quick question here, do these dodgy orders land into the Pending Payment Service Provider tab within the Orders tab in Actinic ?
Also, have you had a word with Paypal themselves, to check if there might be a possible (and intermittent) delay from their end in sending the authorisation callbacks, thus resulting in the missing link in the receipt page ?

[PA.com]

Hi Krithika,

Thank you very much for your reply.

In answer to your question, in the case of both the problems I have described, the order appears in the 'Pending and Completed' tab. So even if the customer reports that the links haven't appeared on the receipt page (or email), the order has still been fully authorised by PayPal - I get my money and the customers gets their receipt, just not the links. Something seems to be stopping the links from appearing, in some seemingly random cases.
As I say, I have made well over 100 test orders on my site (using PayPal), and never had a problem receiving links, so I wonder if this could be a case of customers having different firewall setups, or browsers, or whether it could be based on the email address they give...(i.e. spam filters)? Or as you say it could be that there are intermittent PayPal authorisation delays, but surely this would mean the orders wouldn't come through as completed - or would it??

At the moment, I am torn between two fairly expensive possible 'cures', but I'm not sure if either will help. If its a PayPal problem, then I can upgrade to Worldpay in the hope that this helps alleviate these problems. If its a server problem, then its more of a hassle. As it is I'm paying a fair amount for a good-spec shared hosting package, so I guess all I could do would be to switch to a dedicated server.

Or I could make both of these expensive upgrades and find the problems still persist. Not sure what to do really.

[pinbrook]

Paul

I just placed an order and downloaded the mp3 ok.

What happened to the paypal authorisation at your end?

[PA.com]

Thanks Jo (just refunded that order - hope that's been received).

The order that you kindly placed came through perfectly to me, with proper PayPal authorisation, and it sounds like you didn't have a problem with downloading. (How funny that you chose the Haydn Trumpet Concerto out of the 200 possibilities - I have JUST this second finished making a improved recording of that very work which I'm about to upload!)

May I ask Jo, did the links come through on both the email receipt and the store receipt page okay? On a more subjective point, was there anything you thought was particular confusing about the checkout procedure that could mean customers could be left in limbo.

This kind of points to the quandry I'm in at the moment. I know perfectly well that using PayPal, customers from all over the world ARE able to make purchases on my site and download files. If this were true 100% of the time then I would be quite happy to leave things the way they are.
But often, somewhere along the line an unidentified gremlin runs off with the links before the customer gets them, and I don't know quite what options I can take to prevent this. I'd feel a bit of a numpty if I took out a mortgage to fund Worldpay and found the problems persisted.

The other possibility is my web-hosting setup. I currently have more than 900 MP3 files (about 2.5Gb of data) held on a shared server with an allowed capacity of 5Gb. Could this be a problem, simply to much data for the server to access, and this is why sometimes the links aren't retrieved properly. Surely not...

[Andy Warner]

not direcly linked but...

Hi All,

on the donwload timeout issue...

I have had lots of problems with ftp sessions just stopping for no apparent reason recently, and when I changed the router/modem I was using, all these problems stoopped INSTANTLY. So, I am wondering if the problems your customers are getting is related to the issue I had - namely my router misbehaving...?

no real help I guess, but it might be an issue and thus might show why some people have NO problem with downloading and others get timeouts.

My routers are both 100% working with a different web host... odd.

andy