Missing Order(s)

  • Resolved narrowback

    (@narrowback)


    6 years, 10 months ago

    Hi there,

    I have a few orders that appear on the payment gateway dashboard but do not have an equivalent order in woo. Woo pointing at gateway, gateway pointing at woo but the theory they both have is that perhaps user closing browser before transaction completes.

    I dont care who’s fault, I need a means to match orders when this happens.

    I have asked woo if the order can be started and put into pending status BEFORE sending request to payment gateway and awaiting a response. They said thats how it should work, but the payment gateway plugin could be breaking this. I asked “If orders started before sending to gateway, how could any response from gateway delete the order? There must be record of it somewhere?” The answer was a nice but dismissive, anything can happen with bad gateway plugin.” Well, I dont buy it but we’re at an impasse.

    The payment gateway folks (ETS – emoney.com) created this plugin but seems to be more skunkworks. No logging, No real support.

    99.9% of the transactions make it though, but its the remaining that I need to investigate and with no record at all on the woo side, which includes most of the customer contact details, it makes it impossible.

    Questions:
    1) Any way to force woo to create order before submitting to payment gateway?
    2) Any way to look up phantom orders elsewhere, like in database, or are they really not committed to DB until payment gateway responds?
    3) Any specific advice I can force onto the payment gateway devs to break the impasse?
    4) Strategies to keep user from closing browser before transaction completes? Warning message next to the Buy button not doing much,

    Thanks for any and all responses.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Hannah S.L.

    (@fernashes)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey there!

    I have asked woo if the order can be started and put into pending status BEFORE sending request to payment gateway and awaiting a response. They said thats how it should work, but the payment gateway plugin could be breaking this. I asked “If orders started before sending to gateway, how could any response from gateway delete the order? There must be record of it somewhere?” The answer was a nice but dismissive, anything can happen with bad gateway plugin.” Well, I dont buy it but we’re at an impasse.

    The correct workflow is as follows:

    1. Customer clicks “pay now” or whatever the equivalent is for that payment gateway
    2. Order is created in WooCommerce and set to pending (it’s immediately written to the database)

    Then a bit of logic:

    * If the order goes through and IPN is working, the order status is updated to “processing” and all is well
    * If the payment is canceled, usually the order is set to “canceled”, though this can be tricky depending on the gateway
    * If the “hold stock” window (under Products > Inventory) is reached without payment being received, the order is set to “failed”

    None of that can happen if the order isn’t created – which is why Woo creates the order so early in this process. If the payment gateway messes with that process, it messes up the entire payment process, which is why we’re so careful with third party payment gateways.

    3) Any specific advice I can force onto the payment gateway devs to break the impasse?

    I don’t have any specific advice here. In these kinds of cases, I tend to recommend going with a different gateway that proves more reliable for you, such as Stripe.

    4) Strategies to keep user from closing browser before transaction completes? Warning message next to the Buy button not doing much,

    This is a frustration for all e-commerce shop managers, as it does break the process to a certain degree. Normally Woo catches this by already creating the order so at least there’s something to fall back on.

    I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, beyond supplying some background information for you! If you do have any further questions, I’ll do my best to help.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Hannah S.L.. Reason: Formatting
    Thread Starter narrowback

    (@narrowback)

    Thanks for the response. The creator of the gateway plugin is slow to respond.

    How can I enable logging on the woocomerce side to see/trap issues like this? I still find it hard to reconcile that orders started in woocomerce can be created but not logged/stored in some way, regardless of what issue may exist on the gateway plugin side.

    Again it works most of the time so if I had way to go through logs to piece some orders back together that would work for now

    Tom

    Plugin Support Hannah S.L.

    (@fernashes)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey there!

    How can I enable logging on the woocomerce side to see/trap issues like this? I still find it hard to reconcile that orders started in woocomerce can be created but not logged/stored in some way, regardless of what issue may exist on the gateway plugin side.

    I think you’re coming at this from the wrong direction. Core WooCommerce handles this well with payment gateways that work correctly. When the gateway plugin runs into issues, the issue is with the plugin and not necessarily with WooCommerce.

    WooCommerce doesn’t have any further checks or logging, beyond what we’ve already mentioned. To handle this further, you’d need to write your own code – if you’d rather not do that yourself, I highly recommend contacting one of the services on our customizations page: https://woocommerce.com/customizations/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Missing Order(s)’ is closed to new replies.