Gift certificate problem

I upgraded to v4 a while ago and have had this problem since then, but only now am I trying again to get it to work...

When a customer buys a gift certificate it shows up in the back end of my site, but no emails are generated to the buyer or the recipient.

Orders are set to be 'processed' when placed, so that's not the problem. I've tried switching that so that I had to process all orders by hand to see if that worked but it didn't.

Gift certificate files have not been changed at all.

I'm not sure if there is some setting in the backend that might be interfering.

I used to sell certificates with v3 and still get requests. Does anyone have a similar problem on idea?

thanks!
Stacelynn

Hi NorthernBead,

We located a ticket that Stacelynn (message above) had submitted to us back then. After quite a bit of troubleshooting, we concluded the following at that time:

The issue here does not seem to be related to Gift Certificates, but rather to PayPal. It appears that PayPal is not correctly communicating back to ProductCart. Please review these settings:

http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/paypal_standard

Specifically, double-check that the "Activate Instant Payment Notification (IPN)" is correct.

The actual cause of the problem might not have been an incorrect setting, but rather an intermittent issue with the PayPal IPN system. PayPal indicated that the issue was resolved, but we also released a patch to get around it. Please see:

PayPal IPN issue (orders remain incomplete) - 03.22.2011
http://www.productcart.com/technical-support.asp#updates

It theoretically could affect the creation of gift certificates since the order remains "Incomplete". If you then were to reset the order status from "Incomplete" to "Processed", gift certificates would not be generated.

In your case, however, it appears that there must be another issue as another payment gateway was used (we know this from a ticket that was recently submitted by the ProductCart reseller that you are working with). We are researching the problem.

I'm glad this came back up again - PC asked me to upgrade my shopping cart to test that theory (which I just haven't have time for) and without the GCs I've missing yet another big season selling them for brides.

I hope the solution is simple!

-----------------------------------
UPDATE!!

I just turned on the manual credit card field (thus no processor involved at all) and it worked fine. All emails were generated without a problem... Don't know why we didn't think to try that before.

Hope that helps


Edited by caughlan - 28-March-2011 at 2:44pm

It turns out mine was a one-time glitch. Everyone looked at my system and it was all good. I placed the exact same order my customer did and the GC's worked fine. Just one of those things

Are you getting the order?  It seems to me that if no email is sent and GC is not generated, then the order is probably incomplete as well.  This is typically because PayPal is not setup properly.  Did you check the settings in the help links we provided?  PayPal logs all of their IPN callbacks.  So you can also go into IPN History and check for errors with the IPN (Instant Payment Notifications).  However, I cannot help you via the forum because I would need access to your control panel.  If you need further assistance please open a ticket.