Customer Support

For E-Commerce accounts, we have added to the information that can be displayed in the Retrieve order tools.  Only the listing of “incomplete” orders has been affected.  Prior to this change, you could only display incomplete orders that were more than seven days old.  The reason for the delay is because some shoppers will start a shopping cart, leave the website, and return later to complete the order.  Because a “cookie” was stored on their computer with their shopping cart information, they can pick up where they left off.  There is no way for you to know whether the shopper will return to complete their order.  If you were to change the status of their account in the middle, you could mess up the order.  To reduce the probability of this conflict, we did not show incomplete orders until seven days of inactivity had passed.  For a number of reasons (primarily related to PayPal), this sometimes caused some hassles. 

With this change, the selection of “incomplete” orders will contain everything previously included plus any orders that have been submitted for payment but have not yet received confirmation from the credit card gateway or from PayPal.  IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT CHANGE THE STATUS OF THESE ORDERS UNLESS YOU ARE SURE THAT THE PAYMENT PROCESSING HAS CONCLUDED.  Usually, the payment processing occurs in a few seconds.  So if an hour or more has gone by, you are probably safe to assume nothing more is going to happen.  Generally, you should leave these orders alone.

Generally, this change should have no affect on normal day to day ecommerce business processes.  However, we have experienced some anomalies interfacing with PayPal during the last step of processing an order.  This change is one of several changes we are making to diagnosis the problem while providing a “work around” solution to some of the issues.