Email to Customer

I think I know what’s going on, but I’ll need you to confirm.

With PayPal Standard, they’re using IPN to update the order status to completed based on the payment_status in the IPN message, and the emails are not sent from WooCommerce until the order is Completed. Express Checkout is not doing that for you, and the orders are being left as “Processing” in your system, so the email isn’t getting sent. If you were to manually update those to Completed it would send the email at that point. At least that’s my assumption.

We did not build IPN into this plugin because we created a separate free plugin, PayPal IPN for WordPress, that can be used to do the same thing and a whole lot more.

That plugin basically sets up your WP site as an IPN listener for PayPal so that all data that hits your PayPal account will be sent to the listener and saved accordingly. The plugin has lots of hooks that allow you to trigger your own functions based on the transaction type or payment status of the IPN.

For example, to update your WooCommerce order status the same way PayPal standard does, you would install the IPN plugin and then add this to the functions.php file in your theme (or in your own plugin file.)

function update_wc_order_status($posted) {
    $order_id = isset($posted['invoice']) ? str_replace('woo-','',$posted['invoice']) : '';
    $order = new WC_Order($order_id);
    $order->update_status('completed', 'PayPal IPN updated order to completed.');
}
add_action('paypal_ipn_for_wordpress_payment_status_completed', 'update_wc_order_status', 10, 1);

That would assume that you’re using the invoice prefix option in the Express Checkout settings with the value set to “woo-“. You’ll need to adjust that part to suite your scenario.

That will then update your order to completed based on the IPNs you get, and then your WC emails would be triggered as expected.

I thought maybe it would send the email after I marked it “complete” as well. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I have spent a whole day sifting through forums and videos, downloading this plugin and that, configuring all the extra plugins, making fake purchases to test all the suggestions in the forums, turning plugins on and off, as well as going back and forth with my hosting support. I am tired, frustrated and defeated. Now you tell me that I need to add another plugin and add extra code?

I think I’ll just stick with PayPal Standard. But I do appreciate your timely response.

So I was correct that your orders were getting left as processing?

If the emails are not getting sent even when you update to completed then something else must be going on. Are you sure the emails aren’t going to spam?

At first they were left at Processing and then I would manually choose Completed. Still no email to the customer. Then I used a plugin that automatically sent the orders to Completed. Still nothing. We checked Spam as well and there were no emails. I, as the admin, got notifications in my email, but no customer email was being sent in any of the scenarios I tried.

The site itself is pretty clean as I have very few plugins installed. I am happy to create credentials so you can check out the admin side yourself if you want.

Can you make a test copy of your site at a staging URL so we can set it up with the PayPal sandbox and run test orders?

You are speaking in tongues. I have no idea what you are asking for. I understand each of the words individually, but I don’t know how I would even start to make your request happen.

I am assuming that your site is running on something like https://www.domain.com. A good practice is to have a mirror of that running on something like testing.domain.com. It would have all of the exact settings and setup as your live site, but it would only be accessible to developers, and could be used to test things without affecting the live site.

Some hosts make setting this sort of thing really easy for you, so you may want to ask your hosting company if they can provide that sort of thing. I could set something like this up for you, but that would outside the scope of any free support we can provide.

Then you could create credentials for me on that test site and I could jump in there to troubleshoot the issue and figure out what’s going on.

I can say that when I’m running tests on my current test server (woo.angelleye.com) I am receiving a WooCommerce order receipt as expected with a download link included in that email. Is that the email you’re referring to or are you expecting something else?

This is actually happening even though the order is still set to Processing, so my original theory and solution wouldn’t be necessary.

Let me know, though, if I’m not fully understanding what you’re saying.