ShopSite Knowledgebase

PayPal orders not received in ShopSite (PayPal IPN changes, 2/16/05 through 2/25/05)

Product: ALL
Version: v7.x
Platform: ALL

From 2/16/05 through 2/25/05, I received PayPal notifications of payments which were obviously initiated from my ShopSite shopping cart, but for which there are no corresponding orders in ShopSite. What happened and what can be done about it?

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Solution ID: S5506

PayPal made some unannounced changes to their system early on the morning of the 2/16/05 which changed the format of their IPN callbacks to the ShopSite shopping cart which lets ShopSite know that the payment was completed and to process the order into ShopSite. After these changes, ShopSite v7.x stores using PayPal likely experienced this issue.

ShopSite, Inc. worked with PayPal to return their IPN callbacks to the original (working) format, and on the afternoon of 2/25/05 PayPal did make the fix. We are not aware of this issue continuing past this date.

Shortly after the initial changes made by PayPal on 2/16/05, ShopSite, Inc. released a patch that would accept the PayPal IPN callbacks in both the new and old formats. If your ShopSite version (located in the footer of your main ShopSite menu, start.cgi) is v7.1.4.1 or higher, then you have this patch applied. If you have this patch applied, PayPal should have begun working correctly again for your new ShopSite/PayPal orders at the time the patch was applied, and should still be working as designed. If you have NOT applied this patch, then PayPal should should have begun working correctly again with new ShopSite/PayPal orders as of the afternoon of 2/25/05, and it should not be necessary for you to apply the patch now.

Our understanding is that PayPal continues, for several days after the transaction was completed, to attempt the IPN callbacks until they receive a 'success' response from the shopping cart. So after you had the patch applied and/or after 2/25/05 when PayPal returned the IPN callback to the original format, you may have begun to receive the PayPal-processed orders in ShopSite that you had not received before. You should not receive them all at once because these calls are being made individually for each transaction and on a time-delay based on the date/time the transaction was originally completed. We are also working with PayPal to have them repeat all of the IPN callbacks for transactions that occured during this time period, since some may have passed the several-day period in which PayPal normally repeats the IPN callback.




The following are the details regarding the patch that was released (again, it should no longer be necessary to apply this patch, as PayPal has already resolved this issue):

The patch will require that your ShopSite first be upgraded to the most current v7.1.4 maintenance version, after which the patch can be applied. If you are hosted with a ShopSite reseller, please contact your reseller or technical support contact and request that they perform this upgrade and patch to your ShopSite store. Otherwise, see http://www.shopsite.com/support.html for additional support resources and options.

This patch is now available for all of our supported platforms. It is on the same FTP site where ShopSite installation files are normally downloaded, and are in the directory [your_operating_system]/v7.1.4/patch/.

For FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris, the patch file is called 'libsscommon.so.1' and should replace the file of the same name in the ShopSite CGI Directory (this directory is usually named 'ss' or 'bo'). For BSDi, the patch file is 'thankyou.cgi' and should replace the file of the same name in the Shopping Cart CGI Directory (this directory is usually named 'sc' or 'sb'). For Windows, the patch file is 'common.dll' and it should replace the file of the same name in BOTH the ShopSite CGI Directory and the Shopping Cart CGI Directory. Remember that this patch should ONLY be applied AFTER the store has already been upgraded to v7.1.4.

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