Checkout issues??

[MJP]

Hi all, I just went online with the site and store last week and have a few orders a day. Yesterday I got an email from a customer claiming to have ordered some product, but I got no order from Miva. I went to the payment gateway and it was there. #57 and it was authorized. After emailing the customer, it seems that he had a problem at checkout. He typed his zip code wrong and got a zip verification error. I dont understand how the gateway authorized the card if the order failed. There is no order 57 in Miva admn. After he got the error he clicked the back button on the browser and fixed it and then finished the order. I dont know why then i didnt get a Miva order? It seems to me that if the order fails for any reason, theres no where to go exept continue or the back button of the browser. Should I put a LOGOUT button on the checkout page? Any suggestions?
(Using Linkpoint Gateway)
Thanks for your time,
Mike
www.chowardcompany.com

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Hi Mike, be prepared for this to happen more during the holiday season as Linkpoint has historically been very unreliable each Christmas season for the past few years.

I'm going to guess that what happened is some other type of error that made him think the order had gone through when from Merchant's perspective it had not. When an order is declined in Merchant with the Linkpoint gateway, Merchant is supposed to increase the order number that it would have given that customer because Linkpoint stupidly won't accept an attempt at the same order number again even after a decline. So if this customer would have been order 57 and they declined once because of a bad zip code, Merchant has to reassign them to order number 58 and send that to Linkpoint on the next attempt. What may have happened is the customer just got an application timeout on the second attempt while Merchant waited to get a response from Linkpoint and that resulted in a charge but no order recorded in Merchant. IF the customer has a good memory, try to find out if they made it to the invoice screen where it actually told them their invoice number as making it to that screen should only happen after the order has been successfully recorded in the orders table of the database.