item_name changed to "Shopping Cart" in IPN

-mort
Contributor
Contributor

In the IPN, since 08/08/2017 I have 4 instances of the item_name being changed to "Shopping Cart" the submitted item_name was something like "Multiples Order: ribgn29ng HEADSHOT_NOLAN" Other IPN arguments are returned correctly.

I suspect these orders were using guest payment not PayPal accounts.

-mort

Login to Me Too
13 REPLIES 13

decomplexity
Contributor
Contributor

And me!

My IPN and PDT programs are now both passed an item_name of Shopping Cart intermittently even though the item name is hardcoded in my 'PayPal Standard HTML' interface (i.e. the user isn't given any opportunity to set it). This uses a simple <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick"></input> so has no reason to rename the item or think that is in a shopping cart call. 

 

90% of purchases work fine - it is just the odd few that exhibit this.

Login to Me Too

sje123
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same problem, I am sending the actual item name through as a custom variable now, very annoying, maybe somebody from PP can tell us what's going on.

Login to Me Too

decomplexity
Contributor
Contributor

My guess is that the problem is more fundamental: that the HTML API's cmd=_xclick (BuyNow) is, at some point in Paypal's own processing, being handled as a cmd=_cart and item_name is being treated as unset (and PayPal is then defaulting it to "Shopping Cart").  

Login to Me Too

decomplexity
Contributor
Contributor

A bit more information...

When I do a downloaded activity report, the following fields are blank on the offending items:

Item title

Item ID

Quantity

 

Note that the payments were processed successfully (i.e. credited to the account) but the resulting bad IPN made the order undeliverable: we had no idea what the curtomer ordered!

 

Come on PayPal  - this is a serious issue. If something is hosed from a bad systems update at least provide us a workaround

Login to Me Too

decomplexity
Contributor
Contributor

I checked all incoming orders and the first one we had with this problem was on 10th August. Though since it is intermittent, the problem could have existed a bit earlier.

I can see no pattern to distinguish the problem orders with the ones that work successfully: on one of the sites with pages dedicated to ordering one or more of a specific service, all the user can key in is the amount to pay!

Some are standard (PC) payments and some are mobile payments.

Login to Me Too

joewakeford
Contributor
Contributor

Same issue going on here, I'll be watching this thread with great interest. We've troubleshooted other aspects of our sites and have narrowed the issue down to PayPal. So, eek, are they listening?

Login to Me Too

decomplexity
Contributor
Contributor

I have today 21st logged this issue to PayPal Tech Support as incident 170821 dash 000112.

One would think that anyone using the PayPal Standard HTML API would potentially be affected.

Login to Me Too

KWD
Contributor
Contributor

This started happening with my client's websites on 8/19. It's a real big problem for us as our code looks to that field for how to process the transaction.

Login to Me Too

jez6363
Contributor
Contributor

From around 8th July 2017 occasionally the IPN message had a blank field for item_name. However when you checked in PayPal the product was correctly specified (the title of the field is "Item title" on the webpage when you go into details for the transaction - I assume this is the same field that is put into item_name?).

 

It appears that this behaviour was from July 8th to July 17th, and then it stopped.

 

As of early August (first seen on 11 Aug) very occasionally the IPN item_name field contains "Shopping Cart" and in PayPal the product name also says "Shopping Cart"

 

We also believe it is when users make Guest payments that it happens, but have not thoroughly tested that.

 

 

The same problem is affecting another site I am aware of, so I expect it is quite a widespread problem.

 

Horrendous problem for PayPal to have, and very concerning, and it being intermittent could imply a serious coding problem, which does not speak well to the internals of the PayPal system. That or they have multiple servers and some of them are basically broken - maybe they are testing new code on the live site, and they roll it out to a few servers at first, so it just depends which server your transaction hits.

 

Login to Me Too

Haven't Found your Answer?

It happens. Hit the "Login to Ask the community" button to create a question for the PayPal community.