Getting “Your donation could not be processed.” but donation is going through

Before I start a new topic, I thought I would post on this one because its a very recent new topic and I think I have the same or very similar problem. Maybe. If It’s different, Ill start a new topic so as not to mess this one up.So here is my issue:
Our small charity has got two fund raising campaigns going on atm that have seen a lot of payments in the last 48 hours. Getting the usual batch of payments that show in WP dashbaord as ‘pending’, because something has gone wrong their end on the paypal input side, and most have retried and been successful. Also loads of payments have gone through normally and successfully.
However, it has come to my attention on 3 payments in the last 24 hours, I am seeing them as pending in dashboard, but they have gone through and the payee has received the paypal receipt confirmation. I didnt question it first time, because the lady concerned is a known ditzy technophobe who could break anything online. I just assumed she had somehow managed to cancel original payment from website, and managed to pay directly to paypal, therefore bypassing the system as it were.
However, since then it has happened twice more. Payment has gone through their end, but I see it as pending many hours later. There may be others I dont know about yet, some are pending and they haven’t retried – for all I know, theirs have gone thru too. Never to my knowledge had this happen before, so to suddenly have it at least 3 times seems odd, hence my visit here to support.
Between the first two happening, and the one this evening, I installed the latests charitable update, which is really just info on the timeline.
Because it seems to be an intermittent fault, I can’t get it to replicate, my tests are working perfectly normally every time.

@ralonzo29 Does this sound similar to your problem?

@yvonnephoto
No all the items sent are visually not going through but paid in full in the back end. I found out there was another plugin interfering with the front end response.

Glad you were able to resolve this issue @ralonzo29!

@yvonnephoto: Based on what you have described, it sounds like you have had several donations go through and processed on PayPal, but not updated to Paid in Charitable. Is that right?

Have you had other donations go through successfully and marked as Paid in between?

For the pending donations, in the WordPress dashboard, check what shows in the Donation Log meta box for those donations; sometimes that has more information about why the donation is still pending.

Cheers,
Eric

Yes, glad you resolved it @ralonzo29

@wpcharitable Yes, had a lot of payments go through completely normally. This is happening on [fag packet maths here] about 3-4% of payments.

I have some more info now, as Ive since been able to access the actual paypal account, and I still don’t know if it’s a plugin or paypal error. However, if nothing else, I wasnt to post here so you guys were aware and could monitor if anyone else was getting similar issues.

So, the gist is, that they fill out the website form, click ‘donate’ and are taken to the paypal part of the submission. I think this is where something is breaking down in the communication between plugin and paypal. My paypal reports show ‘General Payment’ instead of ‘Donation Payment’ and no campaign title is listed in the relevant column of the report – which suggests its losing communication quite early in the process, rather than it just being a case of the completion ‘ping’ not coming back to the plugin/website. So the payment completes, but it never comes back to us as complete, it just remains pending, no more info is generated in the log in the dashboard you mention, and the payees don’t get the thank you email from the plugin/website.
What they are getting is the paypal confirmation email receipt that they have made the payment – and here is also a ‘thing’ that may or may not be significant. That paypal receipt shows the name of the charity, just as does when the payment completes through the site. Anyone who has just gone directly to paypal and paid directly, that receipt shows the email address, not the charity name. Could be significant, might be nothing, but thought I would mention it.

Ive gone through all payments for the last 2 months, and this appears to have only started on Monday, 30th November. I can’t find any previous examples of it.

I looked for any obvious patterns to explain it, but nothing stands out. The numbers it is happening to is very low, so its an annoying niggle rather than a big problem (and hey, at least we are getting the donations, even if we don’t know about it), but it’s a bit irritating knowing I have to go through every payment left pending and manually check whether it did or didn’t complete. Our donations are generally slow and steady, but December is mad busy, typically!

Anyway, here is an example of one of the campaigns if it is of any use for you to see.

Will also say, no new plugins have been added, or removed and no themes changed.

So… a bit stumped and might be nothing to do with the Charitable plugin, and I guess could still be within the realms of user error but I would be surprised to have never apparently had same user errors in the past. Many of our supporters are self confessed technophobes! ??

I hope all this makes some kind of sense. Im reasonably tech minded, but no expert and try and keep things simple, because Im not a developer, programmer, etc.

Many thanks

Yvonne

https://kapsaonline.com/campaigns/black-friday-2020-auction-payments/

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by yvonnephoto.