no record of orders. Help!

[newmarket2]

Normally, both the customer and we, the merchant, receive a notification via email that an order has been placed; and, if we go to the order screen, we can see the order, but recently
we have only received notification from paypal that an order has been placed and there is no evidence of that order and no confirming emails.
Our host is Verio, whose tech support is rudimentary at best.
Need help!

[Jim]

See this post. http://support.shopsite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9446

[newmarket2]

Jim,
Can you give me the path name to the data directory?

[Jim]

Go to Preferences > Hosting Services and it will be displayed near the bottom of the screen in the field "Data Directory:"

[newmarket2]

OK, I found the directory, but in that directory the file is named:
paypal.aa.lk
not
paypal.aa

Further, when I download the file, it's empty.

[Jim]

if there is file .paypal.aa.lk then there must be a paypal.aa file. Look farther down in the file listing, the files that start with . (dot or period) are usually hidden files but they do show up in some ftp programs. Since . comes before letters alphabetically they will be near the top of the list and the actual file will be farther down in the list of files.

Any file with a .lk extension is just a lock file used to make sure the file of that same name (without the .lk) can't be accessed simultaneously by multiple processes.

[newmarket2]

great. that was it. I'm so unused to unix!
I was able to make that one tiny correction, so things should be good.

Any guess as to how long before we see if it works? I think I understand that PayPal sends IPNs on some kind of schedule. If it's every 6 hours, I'll have lunch; if it's every 2 minutes, I'll wait and check.

[Jim]

I think they have a sliding window. They try and if that doesn't succeed they wait for a period of time and try again. It that doesn't succeed they wait for a longer period with each try being at a longer period than the one before. When we were testing the fix it just took a few minutes for an order that had been place to finally come through and a few that were placed before that one took a bit longer but all the test orders eventually were completed and showed up in ShopSite.

[newmarket2]

Well, we're in touch with the customer and can send them the product directly, and our order volume is pretty small so I'll wait, but if nothing's happened by tomorrow, you may hear from me again.

[newmarket2]

Thought problem was fixed yesterday at 2:30 pm edt.
Was able to see added "/" in paypal.aa
But, it's now almost 11 and the order has not come through.
Further, had an identical problem in mid August, although the SS KB article indicates the problem arose Sept 11 or 12.

Looks like there is still a problem.