Hi @lgoddu,
For a bit of context, here’s the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:
1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.
2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to Pending.
3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction, as well as ongoing subscription renewals.
4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.
5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to Complete.
If GiveWP does not receive that webhook/IPN notification, the donation will remain Pending and eventually change to Abandoned.
The are 4 main reasons why Paypal donations remain pending. In order of occurrence (most to least common) they are:
1. The donor finished their donation on PayPal.com, but they didn’t click the “Return to {website}” link.
That link would return them to your Donation Confirmation page and send a signal to GiveWP that the donation is completed. Without that signal, GiveWP can’t know that the donation is completed.
To test that, simply make a donation and make sure you click the “Return to {website}” link on the Paypal checkout page.
2. Cache.
Caching is handled differently on various sites and web hosts, and most of them allow for excluding specific URLs or parts of URLs from caching. At the very least, you should exclude the following slugs from caching:
/donations/
/donation-confirmation/
/donor-dashboard/
Also, the following query strings:
give-embed=donor-dashboard
giveDonationFormInIframe=1
Your host or the caching plugin/solution you are using can help with that. Some of them may require what’s called a “wildcard” like /donations/* to capture all subdirectories under the /donations/ folder.
You can also temporarily disable caching on the site to confirm that the uncached site isn’t showing the problem.
While fine-tuning cache falls outside the scope of the support we’re able to provide, your success with online donations is our number one priority, and we’re happy to provide any tips.
3. The IPN is not reaching the site or the site is blocking the IPN.
The steps to troubleshoot this issue are as follows:
1. We need to check if the payment actually made it to the gateway. You can easily check that in your Paypal account. (This is not your case).
2. Next, we need to check if the IPN reached your site. This can be done by checking your IPN history page in your Paypal account. The account holder has to check for this.
If the IPN history page shows no errors or a 200 response code from any recent IPN notifications that means the issue is on the site.
3. The server access logs might also record any errors from incoming traffic into the server.
If the server error log shows no errors and the host is not blocking the IPN then we assume a plugin/theme conflict.
4. Plugin/theme conflict.
The way to test for plugin/theme conflicts is to deactivate all non-related plugins and switch to a default theme, do a test donation and see if the problem persists.
