Every few months Square stops working in WooCommerce and we can’t take orders

  • Resolved cvstock33

    (@cvstock33)


    6 years, 2 months ago

    Every few months my wife’s website loses the ability to take online orders via Square which is connected through WooCommerce in her WordPress site. We don’t know it’s down until a customer tells us they can’t place their order.

    I contacted Square who said to talk to WooCommerce about it. WooCommerce has paid support options but first they suggest going to this www.remarpro.com forum for help.

    This is not a problem that is unresolved right now if you look at my wife’s site. I just fixed it again (September 26th) but suspect it will pop up again in a month or 2. This has happened 2 or 3 times since first of the year.

    Everything gets working again fine if I disconnect from Square in WordPress admin panel and then reconnect Square by authenticating it with account email and password. WooCommerce pops up and says we are authenticated. Then orders go through again just fine until it happens again. I always place a test order after re-authenticating and it integrates and processes my credit card just as it is designed to do.

    So the web developer who designed site originally using a custom WP template he made tells me I fixed the problem and everything must be fine (?) But then it will stop processing orders again in a few weeks or months and we have no way of knowing it until a customer gets a failed transaction and lets us know our site is not accepting credit cards. He’s not returning my calls at the moment, he may not be interested in helping me with an intermittent problem like this.

    Does anyone have any ideas why it would do this periodically? Can you see anything in the coding that suggests the problem? I’m not a designer or web developer but have a working knowledge of WordPress.

    When we have this credit card disconnect problem the customers sees this message in their checkout page:

    “Error: Square was unable to complete the transaction. Please choose another means of payment”

    I update WooCommerce manually when I have this problem, just because I’m in the admin page, but simply updating does not get anything going again. I don’t use auto-updates just because when Square is functioning properly I really don’t want to have an auto-update cause a problem. The only fix to this problem is to disconnect and reconnect Square to Woo Commerce, just updating Woo or WordPress itself does not bring Square back online. I’ve tried that to try to isolate the problem but had no luck.

    It’s frustrating because we don’t know it’s stopped working unless someone tells us their order failed. Makes for a very lousy first impression with a customer. Does it somehow have something to do with WooCommerce or WordPress updates? I generally don’t update plugins often, its a part-time business site and I don’t get into the admin panel very often. If its not broke why fix it. If its processing credit cards I just leave it alone. This week’s breakdown happened without me being in the admin panel in several months, so I also updated WP as well yesterday, along with WooCommerce to latest versions.

    Thanks for any insight or direction on this issue. We love Square and my wife uses the app on her phone all the time, so it was a no-brainer to connect it to her website and have all credit card processing flow through 1 account. Her app never shuts down, it’s only the integration of Square for online orders that causes the problem for customers online on a pretty regular basis.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by cvstock33. Reason: typo in subject line
    • This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by cvstock33. Reason: another typo

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 16 through 17 (of 17 total)
  • Thread Starter cvstock33

    (@cvstock33)

    Hi There. If you look at earlier replies to my thread they gave me a work-around that has been good for last 6 months or so. Need to click on page 1 of this thread:

    “Yes it is possible if you have zero activity with Square whether that is transactions or syncing, then your token may not renew in time of the 45 days and requires a full user authentication.

    So a possible work around for this is turn on auto inventory sync. This would still require “some” activity on your site but at least it won’t require a transaction. So even if a single person visits your site, this cron would trigger.”

    As long as you get a single visitor to your site every 45 days, the system tries to sync inventory (we don’t have any) and that fires the token to update without ever disconnecting Square and doing it all manually. You can probably even be the visitor yourself, as long as someone visits the site it has worked for us. Just mark your calendar to visit your site once a month and see if that keeps Square active and then try a test order like every 90 days to confirm Square is working. Hope this helps.

    Plugin Support John Coy a11n

    (@johndcoy)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Make sure Square is updated and then disconnect and reconnect Square. It’s likely that the access token is expired in the oAuth connection. You can usually see the expiration date in the URL when redirected from Square to WooCommerce.

    Again, disconnect and reconnect until you get a valid response.

Viewing 2 replies - 16 through 17 (of 17 total)
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