Lee Blue

As of Cart66 1.1 the “session” data for Cart66 is stored in the database. We did this for a several reasons. It resolves the “incomplete object” issues when other plugins call session_start() before cart66 is loaded. Also, if you are running a load balanced server cluster, the cart data needs to be available to all the servers in the cluster. Having the cart session data in the database allows all the servers in the cluster to access the cart data whereas this would be very difficult using the filesystem based session management in PHP.

When you are specifying the path to your digital product in the Cart66 Settings panel, you should use the absolute path to the product and not a URL to the product. So, for example, it should be something like /var/www/httpdocs/products/mySongs.zip and it should not be a URL like http://www.mysite.com/products/mySongs.zip

If you are already using the absolute path to the product and not a URL I’ll research this further and see if there may be a problem with either the .htaccess file I suggested or the Cart66 code.

There is not a built in setting to allow this but you can easily manually tweak the source code to this. Take a look in the file cart66-lite/models/Cart66.php and you will see a function called buildAdminMenu() – it’s around line #317. There you will see a bunch of calls to add_submenu_page(). One of the parameters to the add_submenu_page() is ‘manage_options’ just change the ‘manage_options’ parameter to ‘edit_pages’ and then anyone with permission to edit pages will have access to that Cart66 admin page.

Question 1: Good point about customizing the email receipts.

Question 2: To manage the order status, first setup the different status names in the Cart66 Settings panel as a comma separated list of statuses like: new, complete, refunded

Then to change the status of an order, go to the Cart66 Orders panel, click to view an order, then you will see a drop down list of all the status names you set up. Select the status you want to use and click update.

Question 3: When a sale is completed on the PayPal website using PayPal Website Payments Standard an IPN message signaling the completed sale is sent to Cart66 on your WordPress website. When Cart66 gets the IPN it logs the order and sends out the email receipt which should go to the buyer and anyone else listed in the “copy to” field when you configured the email receipt.

If the buyer does not return to your website Cart66 is not able to clear their cart, but they should still get the email receipt since that is triggered by the IPN, not buy returning to your website.

The encryption warning message is probably triggered because the PayPal page the buyer is currently on is https and the page they are returning to is http (not https). If the return page on your site was https also I don’t think you would get the warning.

That being said, I’ll investigate further and see what’s going on with that “return to the seller” link and see if there’s anything we can do on the Cart66 side of things to improve the experience. Thanks for the feedback!

Because of an unknown delay between when the order is completed and when your site actually receives the IPN from PayPal you should not direct folks to the store/receipt page and, instead, should instead create a new page that you use as your PayPal “thank you” page. It can act like a receipt page of sorts by including the [cart mode=”read”] shortcode to have a read-only view of the contents of the shopping cart along with a message that explains that they will be getting an email with a link to their receipt.

Another idea would be to use PayPal Express Checkout. Express Checkout brings your buyers back to your site to complete the sale. Therefore your site knows instantly when a sale has been successfully completed. Since you don’t have to wait for an IPN your customer is immediately taken to their online receipt. This is especially helpful when selling digital products because the “thank you” page you set up using the read-only view of the shopping cart will not contain any links to download the purchased products. Using Express Checkout your buyer will get to their “real” receipt right away where they will find their download links.

hamzahkasom: That is the error you get when you are running PHP4. Ask your web host to upgrade you to PHP5 and you’ll be all set.

An important thing to check is to make sure you are using the correct shortcode for the payment gateway you have configured. So after setting up your gateway info in the Cart66 settings panel go to your store/checkout page and make sure you are using the shortcode for the payment gateway you configured in the settings. For example, if you want to use PayPal Website Payments Standard, you will want to use the [checkout_paypal] shortcode. If you configured PayPal Express Checkout then use the [checkout_paypal_express] shortcode. You can find a list of the available shortcoddes in the Cart66 Shortcode Reference that pops up from the page/post content editor. You can also find the complete Cart66 Lite documentation freely available here: http://cart66.com/lite

Also worth noting, you can use more than one gateway at a time. For example suppose you want to offer both PayPal Standard checkout as well as accepting credit cards directly on your site. You can use BOTH the [checkout_paypal] and the [checkout_authorizenet] shortcodes on the same page. Hope that helps! Best of luck with your stores!

Thanks, Mark, for your comments and instructions. Also, we have the Cart66 Lite documentation available here: http://cart66.com/lite