Ghost Sale

[mrs incredible]

I have received an order confirmation email and downloaded the sale - with no customer or order information in it.
How is this possible?

[TraceyHand]

is it a totally blank order that bring sup some error when you try to open it?
I had one of those the other day and I've no idea why!
I do know, however, that it must have been generated by a certain customer. She'd placed an order for an item which had gone through (and was received here) all fine etc but when she got her order confirmation she received a blank email with no content, reflecting the weird "empty" ordre I'd received immediately afterwards.
It was obviously generated at the sae time as this customers order but, beyond that, I've no idea what happened!
So, pointless reply really..lol

[mrs incredible]

Yep- totally empty, but there were no other sales at the time.
Curious............must have been a ghost!

[Duncan Rounding]

Was it an order for invisible ink?

[Mike Hughes]

It could possibly have been a search engine robot somehow trying to load a final checkout page and submitting blank data. If someone had checked out before with the google toolbar PR turned on then google would have been made aware of the page and could well come back later to see what the content was.

best explanantion I can think of. I'm sure actinic doesn't have any bugs in it.

Mike

[TraceyHand]

I'm not sure that the "ghost" order I had could have been a search engine though because a customer (who had, moments before, placed an order) actually received a confirmation email for that ghost order instead of their actual order. IYSWIM! Even though the order details themsleves contained no email address!
I get a very small number of these empty orders (a couple a year, perhaps) but Iv'e no idea what generates them!
The wosrt bit is not knowing whether there should be a genuine order there with missing details!

[Mike Hughes]

You're probably right. Not sure how an order could get through without a cookie and cart session file anyway.

One of life's little mysteries.

Mike

[fleetwood]

Just had one of these ghost orders here!

3 consequetive orders from same customers:
1st - full details
2nd - order detail but no customer or address or email detail
3rd - full details - new credit card

Haven't spoken to customer yet, but am guessing that the first order either generated an error response at the customers end, or the customer was trigger happy and pressed checkout twice.
Third order was probably customer assuming that first attempt didn't work, and having another go with new card details.

Whatever happened, it is unsettling (although first occurence in over 10,000 orders).

[EDIT] - further reading of the boards suggests this is a V5 problem, and sorted from V6 on, so no major concern as now working on V8 now that Xmas is out of the way, and hope to be up and running soon.

[Paul Bulpit]

We've had these too, at the rate of about one a month on average - there's nothing we can do about it so it gets deleted.

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic writes an error log http://www.mysite.com/acatalog/error.err with each entry timed and dated. Have a look at yours and see what's in there at the time the mystery order went through.