STUBBORN issue: order notifications not being emailed after PayPal payment. Here's what I've tried..

[waveromper]

Hello, hoping someone can give me a straight and easy solution for a mysterious problem. I’ve run several test orders through my new store – not in a sandbox, just by listing items for a price of a few cents and using my [spam-filter]’s PayPal account to go through checkout and pay. But no order notification emails are coming through either to me as the store owner or to the customer. In fact, the customer is redirected to their Order History page after checking out through PayPal and it says there in the orange box “You have not placed any orders.” PayPal is sending the email notifications to both of us showing the payment amount, and I see the order in my dashboard when I go looking for it, but my main concern is that customers will be alarmed when their account doesn’t show the order and they will be contacting me to make sure their order went through after I took their money! I also want the convenience of getting the seller notice as a backup in case PayPal’s payment email doesn’t come through (because that happens periodically with my eBay sales).

 

I have spent hours and hours trying to resolve this by doing research, numerous fixes have been offered on forums but none of them worked. Here’s my info:

• PrestaShop version 1.6.0.14
• Default Theme
• PayPal USA & Canada module version 1.3.8
• PayPal Payments Standard
• Currency is US Dollars
• Live Mode API Settings are correct (primary email address is in both fields for business account and username; password & signature copied and pasted as directed)
• In my PayPal account, Instant Payment Notification (IPN) was disabled. So I enabled it. This made no difference. The notification URL is there from previous shopping cart software I used years ago. I read somewhere that the URL doesn’t matter so I just left it. Also, I’ve searched in vain to find out what PrestaShop URL should be in there. So if that’s the problem I still have no earthly idea what URL goes in there.
   

            In PrestaShop:

• administration preferences / notification section’s “Show notifications for new orders/new customers/new messages” are all turned on to yes
• Maintenance section’s “Enable Shop” is turned on to yes
• I just found the following proposed solution and ran the test and I got a 404 Error: “THIS PAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE / WE'RE SORRY, BUT THE WEB ADDRESS YOU'VE ENTERED IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE” … but I have no idea what this person means. Can anyone explain this and does it apply to 404 Errors?

Try to open this page from the browser - http://www.yoursite.com/modules/paypal/validation.php, if you get an error (error 500, the page cannot be displayed), than this means you have a file permission problem. Most likely, the paypal directory or the entire modules directory is set to 777 and your host doesn't allow that (it is not secure); try changing it to 755. You can also check your server's error log (from your cPanel) to get the exact error. 

 

 

If I can’t get this order processing function working soon, it’s a major dealbreaker for me. I won’t be able to use PrestaShop but will have to spend many more hours trying to find and test another shopping cart system. AAAARGGHH!!    

 

Thank you so much for any help!

[waveromper]

Disappointed ... no replies in 10 days here. Somebody please help!! Getting ready to bail on PrestaShop.

[waveromper]

I spent tons more time on this. Everything is set up correctly in my Mail Alerts module (v3.5.2). Someone suggested the problem might be that my server (BlueHost) doesn't support the PHP mail () function, which is how the email was configured by default in PrestaShop. BlueHost walked me through how to change the parameters to SMTP instead. Didn't seem to fix it. They/we tried all kinds of things for almost 2 hours and nothing fixed it. They gave up. I gave up. Then I read somewhere that sometimes having free shipping makes a difference. I don't remember where I found that info, but I changed the shipping on one of my test products to be free, and I can't believe THAT FIXED IT!! Received the seller's email notification of the order, it's showing up in the back office, and on the customer's end it shows in their account instead of saying "You have no orders."

 

I don't know if I'm going to use PrestaShop because giving free shipping on everything is just not feasible. Alas.