Why do I get aborted Protx orders but no "Failure" notice?

[PA.com]

Hi all,

Whenever I deliberately fail an order on my site - that is to say I reach the Protx page and then press cancel, I receive a ** Protx VSP FAILURE notification ** sent to my email account.

However I seem to have been getting a lot of aborted orders, especially recently, and I receive few such failure notifications corresponding to them.
They come through to Actinic as Pending PSP but are never resolved.
Hence I'm not sure if these customers are being left in limbo at the point of being transferred to Protx. Actinic realises an order has been attempted, but not Protx.

Can anyone please help explain what would be the reasons behind this happening, and is there anything I can do to prevent it?

Thanks, Paul

www.piano-accompaniments.com

[pinbrook]

if someone places an order within actinc and confirms it in the basket, actinic considers it to be an order regardless of whether the customer goes on to pay or not.

Thus people could be hanging between actinic and protx, or they could simply be changing their minds once it comes to actually pay.

[PA.com]

Thanks for responding Jo,

However, I don't think my site works quite the way you described (though I'm sure many Actinic stores must do). The only way I can get Actinic to recognise an order is after I have pressed the final 'Next' button after my two checkout pages, i.e. the point the someone is transferred to Protx (or PayPal). Simply adding and confirming items in my basket doesn't seem to register an order with Actinic.

Therefore I'm thinking that all of my aborted orders are actually people who have pressed 'Next', wanting to get to the Payment Pages.
There they should be able to 'Proceed' = "Success Notification" or 'Cancel' = "Failure Notification". But I'm often getting neither response, and I'm wondering if this is more likely to be my Web-host or Protx or indeed the customer's own internet connection that is at fault.

Thanks again,

Paul

[acompton]

Paul,

If you use the VSP Terminal to have a look at the transaction history (remember to tick the options for Failed Transactions) there might be some hint there as to what is happening.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk
Great board games and cards games you won't find in the High Street

[PA.com]

Thanks Alan, that's helped a lot.

While not all of the aborted orders are accounted for on the Protx site, the following message appears corresponding to certain failed orders. It seems that I don't get a failure notice unless cancel is pressed - if the customer closes the browser at this point there is no Failure Notification:

(from Protx VSP Terminal)
""Customer reached the payment pages but progressed no further. The transaction was timed out.

This status indicates that the customer reached our payment pages, but rather than entering their card details and proceeding, or deciding against continuing the transaction and clicking Cancel, they simply closed their browser or navigated away from the site.

You would expect to see a number of these failures in your list, since often customers change their mind about completing the payment.""


That is reassuring at least, at least such customers ARE reaching the payment pages before their inconvenient attack of cold feet.
However, it doesn't account for some other customers, who I know from contacting them have been left in limbo between my site and Protx. I am still lost for this cause, could there be some code I need to eliminate from my checkout pages, or do I simply have to frown and bear it.

Thanks again,
Paul

[acompton]

If the system is normally working, you shouldn't need to change anything. You could try contacting Prtox support (quoting specific dates and times where these errors have occured) and see if they can trace a problem at their end.

Alan