No order created – payment lost in limbo

  • Resolved Spongejohn

    (@spongejohn)


    1 year, 9 months ago

    Last week I got 2 known cases where user we’re able to pay, but no order was created in woocommerce. This is of course the worst possible scenario, as I can’t do anything about it, yet the clients assume they have paid me.

    They used local payment options (iDeal and Giropay), however this could be a coincidence. The money is deducted from their account and in the German bank account that seems to act as a go between. There is however no money creditted to my paypal account and no order to be found in woocommerce. The messages I see in the woocommerce-paypal-payments log don’t have the custom_id field with the order number in them either.

    For both I see:
    WARNING No order for webhook event.
    INFO Webhook has been handled by CHECKOUT.ORDER.APPROVED

    However this message appears also for orders that are successful.

    I’ve had a similar issues before when validations on a custom field were not checked prior to payment. However, there are no such checks anymore. Also there have been no changes to the code recently. I have updated the plugin to the latest version now (I was using the version from a month ago).

    I have 3 questions:

    – what happens to the money of the client, since I can’t access it and the paypal customer service couldn’t see it either (contact with paypal is still in progress)

    • how is it possible that no order is created in woocommerce? And what can be done to prevent this?
    • Can I in some way create an order manually for the payment to continue and be credited to my paypal?
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Support Syde Joost

    (@joostvandevijver)

    Hello @spongejohn

    Thank you for reaching out to us, we are here to help.

    Alternative payment methods such as iDEAL are?push payments, so it will debit the customer’s bank account as soon as they have authorized/approved the payment.
    If the merchant doesn’t capture this payment, it will be refunded automatically after 3 hours. Depending on the bank, the buyer should see the refund in a few days, as SEPA transactions take a day to process.
    When no order has been created in WooCommerce, then PayPal Payments will also not have captured the payment and so no funds will be added to the merchant account.
    The only scenarios in which I could see this happen are either when the webhooks are not registered, or the buyer did not correctly complete the checkout process (e.g. buyer is not redirected to the order-received page).

    Just to assure you, since there is no order created, the money should be returned within a few days.

    Let me know if you have any further questions.

    Kind regards,
    Joost

    Thread Starter Spongejohn

    (@spongejohn)

    Thank you for your quick and informative response Joost. I can confirm that one of the two clients has received their money back.

    In the mean time though I have another two of these cases when there is a payment made and no order in the system. So I believe the root cause is still there. I’ve had no issues like this since June last year and all of a sudden 4 in one week.

    For a temporary short term solution: Is there a way to disable these localized payment methods?

    For a longer term solution: I don’t know what it means when webhooks are not registered. Is there a way how I can simulate/test that particular scenario on my acceptance/sandbox environment?

    When I simulate successful iDeal payments, they all seems to work fine too.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Spongejohn.
    Plugin Support Syde Joost

    (@joostvandevijver)

    Hello @spongejohn

    There is not really an issue with the webhooks. We expect this issue to be caused by the customer after the payment was pushed. This could be an incorrect detail filled in on the billing details that cancels creating the order, or the customer simply cancelling creating the order (or a system failure on their side).

    The only option for preventing this (at this moment) is to deactivate these alternative payment methods. This can be done by adding them to the field “Hide Funding Source(s)” in the “Standard Payments” tab in our settings page.

    I am still looking for other ongoing improvements, but so far I am not seeing any active ones being worked on at this time. When I find any new efforts, I will let you know in this thread.

    Please let me know if this answers your question, or if you have any other questions for me.

    Kind regards,
    Joost

    Thread Starter Spongejohn

    (@spongejohn)

    Thanks again for the quick response. I have now disabled the alternative payment methods. For some reason I missed this field when overlooking the settings. Thanks!

    Unfortunately for me these payment methods were the reason for switching from PayPal standard to this one. The fact that this plug-in doesn’t support form validations in custom fields I took for granted, despite the extra work it caused.

    I’m also not sure if this can all to blamed on the client side. Given the amount of orders I have, it just feels like too many gone wrong (another one last night) in the past 1,5 weeks. Especially because I didn’t have any of these issues for at least 6 months. I’ll see what information I can gather from the logs and do some tests myself as well to see if I can reproduce the issue.

    Lastly, if there was one feature I’d like to add is that as a merchant I would like to be able to manually capture that payment without order. Because that way I can actually help the customer. Now I have angry customers who think I’ve taken their money. Even though the money will be returned, it takes too long. Their trust in the site is gone and they will not come back. And basically there is nothing I can do, except for offering the digital product they think they’ve bought for free (since the money is refunded). I wouldn’t mind this as a premium feature either.

    Thanks again for your help and information, it’s much appreciated.

    Plugin Support Syde Joost

    (@joostvandevijver)

    Hello @spongejohn

    It’s indeed unfortunate we cannot do anything to resolve this straight away. However, we are working on improving the checkout validations and I will link the feature request to the specific one for alternative payment methods in this thread. This thread will be update once this has been release, but this could take some time. Since there are no other actions we can take on this, I will mark this thread as resolved.

    Kind regards,
    Joost

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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