Paypal - General script error

[stualk]

Hi folks,

Got a strange thing happening when placing orders using PayPal at the website www.blacksheepwools.co.uk. The site has recently been redesigned and relaunched and PayPal was working great on the previous site (it was hosted at www.blacksheepwools.com)

However, since the relaunch people are able to complete payments with PayPal and then at the very last stage they're getting a "A General script error has occurred" message. The message says "Your shopping cart has expired, orders must be completed within 24 hours or they will be cancelled"

The thing is the orders are still coming through as normal but obviously because the customers are not getting to the final receipt page it means neither the customer or administrator are getting the order confirmation email, and a flurry of emails are coming asking "did you get my order?"

We've tried doing a website purge and refresh but that didn't seem to work. We've also checked the auto-return settings in the PayPal account to see if the change of hosted domain is causing an issue but it looks like auto-return is turned off.

Has anyone come across anything similar before and if so, what did you do to get around this?

[Mike Hughes]

Odd. I can see you've had a lot of these recently.

I tried a test order and coudn't see anything obviously wrong with any of the checkout or urls.

Have you checked the return url specified for paypal / receipt page.

Mike

[stualk]

Hi Mike,

Do you mean the return URL specified when you login to your PayPal account itself? Auto-return is actually turned off and there's no URL specified. This is how it's always been...but I can't remember for the life of me how it previously worked! I think it used to say "Thank you for paying with PayPal" along with a 'return to merchant' button.

[stualk]

Has anyone else ever come across this? Having spoken with support they've asked me to try 'localhost' in the smtp settings but when I did this the network settings test failed. I'm at a complete loss as to what could be causing this and it's causing real problems.

Just to confirm, people are managing to complete their payments with PayPal but when they get the final PayPal screen with the 'Return to merchant' button, it's when they click that button that it diverts back to the website but a general script error occurs. If you then try to browse the website again it appears that there are still items in the shopping cart too, even though the order was completed. So odd this.

[stualk]

I'm losing the will to live with this problem. Actinic support don't seem to know what is causing it either and it's leading to constant calls and emails from customers asking if their order has gone through. The things we've tried so far are:

- website purge and refresh
- ensuring auto-return from PayPal is set to off
- replacing the PayPal OCC scripts with those in the original folder and doing a full web refresh
- adjusting the layout of the shopping cart, PSP bounce and receipt pages to a standard Actinic layout (as I was told PayPal doesn't like customised checkout pages)
- adjusting the shopping cart expiry period up to 24 hours, then 48 hours, then 50 hours (on advice of Actinic support)

At each stage above we've emptied the cache and tried a test order but just get the same old error message. Running out of ideas of things we can try. Has anyone else any idea what could be causing this at all? We'll try anything!!

[leehack]

A database compact and a script number change seem the only two things you haven't done, worth crossing them off the list also. Increment the script number by 1 and refresh the site.

[stualk]

Thanks Lee, I will give this a go.
I think we have compacted the database actually, each time we close Actinic, but the script number change sounds like a good thing to try.

[stualk]

Not yet Louise - it's a really big site so I'm dreading having to try that but I guess we're running out of options at the moment so we need to give that some serious thought soon.

[Mike Hughes]

The really odd thing about this is the 'cart expired' error.

I've checked your server clock. Have you checked that the PC you're using is set up for the right Date and Time and the right Timezone (GMT)?

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

PS. There's something strange going on with your site:

This page: http://www.blacksheepwools.co.uk/aca...ed_Cotton.html

Always locks up my PC until I kill the IE8 process. I don't know if there's something there that's dangerous or not as I've never been able to see the page to look at the code.

Is this just me? using IE8.

Mike

Ah sod it. There must be a looping redirect or something at work.

Edit:forget the redirects for the moment, the link above was wrong - now corrected

Go here http://www.blacksheepwools.co.uk/aca...d_Cottons.html
and then click the image in the first section.

Which could explain your other problem. Have you got any redirects going on somewhere? What's in your .htaccess file?

[stualk]

I agree Mike, I can't work out the cart expired error either.

The date and time and timezone are set correctly on the PC.

Weird isn't it. What I also can't work out is why no one else seems to have suffered this problem. The scripts haven't been customised in any way so it shouldn't be happening.

[Mike Hughes]

See my post above. It looks to me as if your problems are more widespread.

Mike

[Rich Brady]

How many products do you have on that page?

http://www.blacksheepwools.co.uk/aca...ed_Cotton.html

It's epically long, which is why IE8 is taking so long to render I think.

[Rich Brady]

The bottom of your pages have ".0"

After which is is a series of iframes and hidden divs with "add this" links... Are you aware of that?

[stualk]

Hi Mike,

Just checked the .htaccess file and it just has an error redirect in there to forward people to the home page if there's an error...

"ErrorDocument 404 http://www.blacksheepwools.co.uk/"

However, I did ask the hosting company to put in place a method whereby anyone that goes to the previous website on the previous server (via Google search results for example) will be forwarded to the equivalent page of the new site (so if someone finds the knitting wool section of the old site on Google it will auto-forward them to the knitting wool page on the new site) Do you think this could cause an issue with the shopping cart? I wouldn't have thought so but I may be wrong.