Knowledgebase
Why do some of our customers have Negative Reward Points?
Posted by Carrie Saunders on 17 February 2011 04:09 PM
Negative points are normal.

The way X-cart operates is it creates a "not finished" order every time an order is started. So for example, if you have a customer apply 100 points to their order and they go to paypal to checkout, X-cart will create a not finished order (lets call it order #300). If their order is successful and they come back to your site with a success, then X-cart changes that order #300 from Not Finished to "Processed". Everything works fine.

Lets say a customer has 100 points total. The issue lies when a customer applies 100 points to their order and they go to paypal to checkout, X-cart as usual, creates a not finished order (lets call this one #301) with 100 points applied to it. They use paypal for their checkout. They get to paypal and decide to not finish the order by using their back button. In this case X-cart has no knowledge that they do not intend to not finish this order ever. So X-cart has 100 points applied to order #301 and is waiting for a "processed" response from Paypal. This customer then immediately chooses another payment method (lets say credit card). This generates a *new* order number (#302) with 100 points applied to it. They finish this order and the status is set to processed.

Now they have this situation.
Order 301 has 100 points applied to it, AND order 302 has 100 points applied to it. So they have used 200 points total when they only had 100 points to begin with. We allow this on purpose as customers would be very upset if they were locked out of points after order 301 and could not finish their order (order 302) with points. The goal is to make customers happy. In essence they are not using more points then they have. They are still only successfully using the 100 points to pay for a completed order (the other order is not complete so they aren't using the other 100 points, it's just in limbo). Now their account has negative 100 points.

The way to solve this is any time you see a "not finished" order status, click on it to see the order and see if they applied points. If they did all you have to do to give back their points is to change the order to "queued" and then change it back to "not finished". That will tell X-cart to recalculate the points by changing the order status.

We do this so that the customer stays happy and can use the points due to them.

Comments (0)
Post a new comment
 
 
Full Name:
Email:
Comments: