Hi there,
Happy to help.
A Pending donation on the PayPal Standard gateway means one of three things:
Your donor was redirected to paypal.com but didn’t finalize their donation.
After your donor finished their donation on PayPal.com, the donor 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 completed. Without that signal, GiveWP can’t know that the donation completed.
The Paypal IPN notification is unable to reach your site.
On some PayPal accounts, the second issue can be mitigated by a redirect: PayPal will redirect back to the donation confirmation page on a successful donation after a number of seconds. On other, newer accounts, that’s a paid upgrade. You should contact PayPal directly to ask for that option to be enabled for your business account.
Being redirected (or clicking) back to the donation confirmation page is crucial in the donation being marked as complete, since there is a slug attached to the end of the URL confirming which donation it is, etc. That slug includes what PayPal calls the IPN or “Instant Payment Notification.” Without the IPN, there’s no way for GiveWP to “know” which payment has gone through to PayPal.
If a donor doesn’t finish their donation, GiveWP puts the donation into “Pending” status. If you cross-check with your PayPal account and notice that that donation was indeed finalized, manually change the status in GiveWP to “Complete”. If you do not do that within around 7 days, GiveWP will automatically change that status to “Abandoned” — meaning the donor never finalized their donation.
For a bit of context, this is 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 the webhook/IPN is unable to reach your site for any reason, the donation will remain “Pending” and eventually change to “Abandoned”.
Paypal calls this an IPN, we have this setup and troubleshooting guide for that:
https://givewp.com/documentation/core/payment-gateways/paypal-standard/troubleshooting-ipn-issues/
In the meantime, cross-reference the payments in Paypal, if they have been processed correctly there, you can manually change the status of the donation from Pending or Abandoned to Complete.
Also, you need to make sure that all the pages related to GiveWP are whitelisted from your cache systems (it depends on the service you are using: a plugin or server). The URL includes:
any page with a donation form on it and/or the donation form URL itself
the /donation-confirmation/ page
the /donation-failed/ page
the /donation-history/ page
the /recurring-donations/ page (if applicable)
Please let us know if you have further questions on this or need any additional assistance!
