does anyone have an idea why order numbers in the'Sales' section of the CMS might be going up on a site even though noone is looking at it?

i understand when people are looking at the site that they are allocated a number so numbers would naturally go up then, however the site is still in development and is only available to logged in users. at the moment that's only me yet they're going up by about 200 per day. rough calculation means that in one year, even if noone looks at the site, it'll be up to 60,000.

any help much appreciated as my programmer has given up on trying to figure it out and i have no idea how to explain it to the client...

What type of ecommerce?
(forum lists Ecommerce, SS Shop, SilverCart and SwipeStripe as options)
What version of that code?
Can you confirm you have NOT added any custom code?

disclaimer -I do not use ecommerce solution and will not post further on this ;-)

This is usually caused by the order ID being used as order reference numbers. Because the 'Order' dataobject is the same that is used for Cart, the ids will go up as users create carts. Obviously some carts are abandoned (in your case about 200 per day), and so you only see the ID of carts that do become placed orders.

My shop module has a 'generateReference' function, which uses the order ID by default, but can be extended to generate whatever reference you like (including a sequential ordering):
https://github.com/burnbright/silverstripe-shop/blob/develop/code/model/Order.php#L656
Pull requests welcome!

thanks swaiba and jeremy.

(swaiba) there is definitely some custom coding going on, the programmer added weight modifiers to the cart. have just pinged him an email to find out which ecommerce it is.

(jeremy) thanks for your reply too. i do understand that order ids are given to folks regardless of if they make a purchase or not, only there's noone looking at the site right now, it's only me (site is only viewable to logged in folks). i'm the only one who's been looking at it and for the last couple of days while the numbers have been going up i've only been logging in once a day to see if they're going up, not snooping around on the site anywhere near enough to clock up 200 per day...?

ok, if you are using the ecommerce module, I previously helped someone bug where a new cart was being created on every page request. This may be the same thing. Have your programmer check when carts are being created. I think you might be able to visit yoursite.com/shoppingcart/debug to see when the id changes.

thanks so much again for your help jeremy. i'll pass all that on to the programmer and cross my fingers (up to order 9000 now!!).

Following on to the posts below, order numbers are still going up at a crazy rate, 1000-2000 per day, and it appears that they are from bots spidering the site.

My layman's understanding of it is that when an actual person looks at the site, they are allocated one order number regardless of the amount of pages they look at. If a bot looks at it though, a new order number is generated for every page it looks at. This resulted in it crashing the server the site is sitting on the other day so am needing to do something about it.

Have read about robots.txt only I don't want to stop google etc from spidering the site. Would appreciate any thoughts about what can be done, cheers.

FYI, I have created a new issue for this here: https://github.com/burnbright/silverstripe-shop/issues/144