We have quite a lot of "New Order Placed" status and are following up with clients.
 
One reported back this:
 
"I went back to the previous pages to double check some data in my order and this caused the order to be aborted."
 
So, it seems that the same order ID is not kept when a user goes back a few pages during checkout.
 
This is one scenario we have found, I'm sure there are more possible outside Viart like closing browser at payment site, etc. but I'm wondering if this is normal behavior in Viart?
 
Any ideas?

We are having the same issue (on Version 3.5).

we are seeing the same thing, (also 3.5), in our case it was (and still is) the handoff to paypal & paypal loosing it's place with the viart integration (the US paypal tier 1 & 2 teams could not figure out why they were doing some of the stuff...) . Viart fixed one bug so it's not as bad but is still happening,
 
We are also seeing problems with timeouts on the viart servers (which we are getting off of as fast as we can)

i'm also seeing the same thing in viarts own pay for custom work screen... paypal rejects it and as a customer you get 'sorry - your last action could not be completed.."

We see this mostly only with WorldPay, not PayPal. It seems to differ per day - some days a lot some days hardly any.
 
We have changed the login page layout according to recommendations shared in another thread re. "proceed to checkout" and specifically changing the "login" template fixed a lot of user confusion issues as I can see.
 
Has the PayPal fix been made generally available? Would this fix allso be applicable for other payment processors? We are also on 3.5.

they didn't give me any detail on what was fixed in the paypal interface (it would be nice if they numbered and posted the fixes & bugs), we are also seeing the payment failure in clumps & the problem clears hours later with no explanation.

would you mind sharing this fix? I've got a lot of these errors.
I am thinking it is a session thing as 3.6 gives me quite a bit of session errors relating to common.php

I had asked Viart a few years ago to fix the workflow. It is the ONLY shopping cart process that I know of that cannot maintain state as a customer navigates back and forth while agonizing over whether to actually confirm and submit an order or not! I get very frustrated with all the 'new order placed' status orders when people were really just checking on shipping costs.
 
This behavior was consistent across all the payment systems I use, and I duplicated it myself many times, each time I tried.
 
Viart needs to implement some kind of stateful data in the session so that the only time an order is registered in the system is when the customer actually submits it for final processing. I understand they fixed something related to this in the last version, but I'm only upgrading this week, so I'm not really sure if the workflow has been brought into the 21st century yet or not.

they didn't give me any details of the fix, at the time the site was hosted by viart and they installed the fix themselves. and have never given me the details.
 
I've never seen a master bug/fix list from viart and know they have fixed a lot more bugs than I've seen in the general patch/release section of the forum.
 
The ability to navigate back (or even use the checkout bredcrums) is a serious flaw in the system and should have been fixed long ago.