AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hi, I'm not sure where to begin to find the solution to this problem.
Customers will order an item but will not get a receipt/confirmation. They will instead see their order status page which informs them they don't have any orders. Then they will try and re-order and sometimes it will go through. In either case they will receive an email stating they've ordered an item, but when they click on the link to see their account status, their account shows no orders. This happens for about 30% of my customers.

They are very confused by the time we talk and I wind up having to delete duplicate orders for items we've received orders for. I so far in my testing have not be able to recreate this issue myself. Is it a browser version problem? Is something timing out of our server that catches people every once in awhile? I'm really unsure on how to proceed to solve this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Nate

The first step in tracing out the problem is to reproduce it. If you are not able to reproduce it there is probably something you are doing differently than your customers. Try with different browsers, different user accounts, different systems, different type of products and different payment methods. Once you are able to reproduce the error you may be able to figure out whats wrong or someone else may be able to give you some pointers.

If you allow anonymous checkout and the customer selects not to create a password and use that, they will not be able to view old orders or connect the old orders together.

Thanks Jmestep - Anonymous Checkout is NOT enabled. This is what makes no sense to me:

If I go to: Admin>People>Users>Edit Users> and look at these tabs:
Account Tab - Correct Data
Address Tab - Correct Data
Purchase History - Totally Blank
Orders - Totally Blank
Page Vies - Correct Data

But the order comes through, the customer gets an email and I can retrieve all the correct order history data needed from Admin>Manage>Orders etc. - it's like we have all the correct data it's just the website can't retrieve Purchase History or Order Data for certain customers...where is the code that does that? Is there a way I can run test on it under different browsers or order environments? Do you think this would be helpful?

Thanks a million - Nate

What build of Able and has the code been customized. It sounds like it might have.
If you want to find a customer's pageviews before checkout, that might help.
Search for the user by the email and you will probably see two records, one with a GUID from before they started the checkout process. That might help to to narrow down the problem.

Thanks for your suggestions...the cart is modified, but barely - to be transparent about this - I'm a noob and the modifications I did were minor. Even so...my guess is that the modifications I made are not the source of this problem...I would assume any modifications I made would have an effect on every checkout instance. This error shows up in about 30% of the orders we take.

- I followed the page views of the customers before checkout and didn't see anything abnormal
- Not sure what the GUID is - each user's email only shows a single record

Is there a way we can get a programmer more experienced with this shopping cart to fix the bug for us?