Problem

These steps demonstrate the problem:

1. Start to place a Companion Software order choosing PayPal for payment.
2. When you get to the PayPal page do not complete the purchase.
3. Navigate back to the Companion Software store and start to place another order choosing PayPal for payment.
4. Pressing Next at this point, you will see the following screen:

 

Cause

The problem is that the Companion Software Store Module (Active Purchase 1.0.6 from Active Modules) saves some cookies to indicate that an order is in progress to avoid the case where the user submits the same order twice. However, these cookies are not reset or removed if the PayPal process is not completed.

Work-Around

In Firefox 2, if you go to Tools > Options > Privacy > Show Cookies for the domain CompanionSoftware.com, you will see two cookies labeled:

    OrderId
    OrderNumber

If you select these cookies and press the Remove Cookie button, before step 3 above, then the order process proceeds as expected.

It is a little harder to delete cookies in Internet Explorer 7. The basic procedure is:

1. Select Tools > Internet Options.
2. On the General tab, in the Browsing history section, select the Settings button.
3. In the Temporary Internet Files and History Settings dialog, select the View files button.
4. Navigate to the cookie file named Cookie:user@CompanionSoftware.com/ where user is your Windows user name.
5. Delete this cookie file. This will delete all the cookies for this domain. But this is ok and much easier than trying to open the file and deleting just the desired cookies.

That's exactly why I don't use PayPal for paying my contractors. There have been too many cases of PayPal either becoming 'unavailable' due to security issues. Or, contractors have tried to get a report from PayPal on deposits, and they were minimal in scope. There are other ways to handle online payroll for contractors and virtual employees.