We had an issue this week where a customer created an order on 7/1, adding items to the cart and getting up to the last step in the PayPal checkout process where you choose your shipping method. Something happened then where customer didn't actually complete the order in PayPal until 7/12. We verified this in our server logs; this customer completed 99% of the checkout flow on 7/1 then didn't get to thanks.asp until 7/12. When the payment was completed, the order receipt was sent on 7/12, but in our admin the date did not update and still showed the order date as 7/1.

We did some more investigating and it seems like this happens with all our PayPal Standard orders, although for most of them the date difference isn't as large. The date listed in the database as the order completion date is always the date the order was created, or the last time the shipping method changed. It does not update once the order completes, and therefore we always see a lag between the order date in admin, and the date the email receipt sends and payment is received.

This does not happen with any of our other payment providers (Auth.net and two custom methods for people who want to mail a check or call their CC information in later). It seems to only be an issue with PayPal Standard.

Has this always been the behavior for PayPal Standard? Or did PayPal change something again in the way they do their reporting that the cart isn't recognizing it?

We tested on our development machine and this seems to be the case with PayPal Express as well.

Hi Dermontti
Do you have supported products as you are showing as "Pre-sales Questions Only" at the moment? If you do, could you update the email that is linked to the purchases?
I tried here and the date for PayPal Standard seems to update fine. Am I right in thinking you still use a version that is now quite out of date? If so, would updating be a possibility?

Vince

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Hi Vince,

We just updated to 7.1.11 in December right before 7.2 became the stability release. We're not quite up to date but I didn't think our version was *that* old either. Updating our store takes time because we have a lot of custom modifications, so we don't do it for every release. We were planning on updating in the near future, though.

This date updating isn't a huge issue for us because most of our PayPal customers complete their orders within a day of starting it; that's probably why we didn't notice it until now. I was curious if it's always been this way or if PayPal did another change without telling anyone such that it breaks cart behavior, like that last issue I brought up.