Missing Order

[tacimala]

I have a client running an osC site. He emailed me this morning with an attached email from a customer saying that she placed an order 3 weeks ago and has not yet received it. There is no record of any order in the system from this customer at all nor is her name on the list of customers in the database.

Has anyone experienced something like this in the past? Is the answer most likely that this person is wrong? Suggestions on the best way to handle this? Thanks!

[stevel]

Do you have your access logs from back then? If so, you can perhaps trace her page flow if you know her IP.

Did she receive any confirmation of the order? Was she charged? Does she have any corroboration she can offer that the order was placed? The way I would handle it is to profusely apologize, say that you don't understand what happened, but will expidite her order if she would place it again, and would make sure she is not charged twice.

I can't imagine how she could get as far as claiming she had placed an order if there's not even a customer record for her. I have heard of cases where payments processed through external gateways have not been shown, but for no evidence of the order or the customer at all to be there suggests that the customer is mistaken (not that you would ever say that to her.)

[tacimala]

No, the logs are not available from those dates. They process the cards offline, so she was definitely not charged for her "purchase". Thanks for the advice, I will pass it on.

[tacimala]

Good idea! I will put that into the works.

[stevel]

Well, with osC, I don't think that will be needed. You couldn't even start to place an order without a customer record.

The only possibility is if your database got "rolled back" to an earlier snapshot and you lost all the transaction records in the meantime. Does your store have "extra order e-mails" turned on? If so, you get a copy of the order acknowledgement sent to the customer - hard to lose that.

[tacimala]

Yea I have that set up, thanks.

[fieryfood]

I have had this happen to me twice in the past year. In both cases, I found out about the order because I was notified by PayPal that I had received a payment. The customers could not have gotten that far in the process without setting up an account - but there was no record of the customers. In one case, the items purchased showed up in mySQL, but no where else. I followed the "profuse apology" route and shrugged it off with "high tech can't be understood by us non-tekkies".
Peggy
www.chilebabe.com