Not user friendly Mailing behavior: New order, order pending

  • Resolved AWEOS GmbH

    (@aweos)


    4 years ago

    Hello WooCommerce-Team,

    as a digital agency which only uses woocommerce to develop highly functional online shops we repeatedly get this feedback from our customers (who run the shops).

    Problem situation:
    When a user buys a product, he gets the “order confirmation mail” bevor he finished paying with paypal. This behavior is ok, when a user chooses direct debit as a payment option, but with paypal, many (not so technical) users see the order confirmation mail and think everything is done. They don’t understand, that the payment is still pending.

    Also these users complain that they get multiple order confirmation mails, if they choose a payment option like paypal, and then, go back to choose another one. Everytime they go back and start the process again with an other payment method, a new order confirmation is send.

    A much much better behavior would be:
    Only send an order confirmation if the order is paid or in a waiting state (like direct debit).

    This is something that every our customers claims after using our woocommerce shops for a while. Help would be really appreciated. Thank you!

    You guys are doing a great job!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi @aweos,

    Thanks for using WooCommerce first of all. We really do appreciate it!

    Excellent point about the emails with “offsite” gateways like PayPal Standard. An order is created as soon as the customer leaves the checkout page. Since payment isn’t taken at that time, an order does need to be created. When payment happens at PayPal the order’s status can then be changed, but it does need the order for this to work correctly.

    Since the issue stems from customers getting multiple notifications or ones before they’ve finished paying, there are a couple of ways you can handle this.

    You could disable the notification for on-hold orders in WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. That way this email isn’t sent at all. Only customers who actually make a payment at PayPal will end up getting an email from WooCommerce.

    on hold

    You might also try deferring email sending just a bit. That way this doesn’t happen immediately. This post has a plugin that you may be able to use to add a delay to emails being sent.

    https://www.damiencarbery.com/2020/04/defer-woocommerce-emails-for-a-few-minutes/

    See if either of those will work for you. If you have any questions, let us know.

    Thanks

    Thread Starter AWEOS GmbH

    (@aweos)

    Good morning and thanks for the quick respone! ??

    Delaying the mails sounds good, but I have one question:

    Will the delay then also send duplicate mails – only later – or will the scheduled action be updated, but still only one mail, if the user goes back and changes the payment method?

    There is no point in using this code, if the user still gets duplicate mails – only later.. ?? Thanks!

    Hi @aweos,

    That’s an excellent question and one I don’t know the answer to off the top of my head. What you might do is set up a staging site (a copy of the live site for testing) and try delaying the emails there. Then see what happens when different user actions are triggered. That way you’ll know for certain how this behaves on your site.

    If you give that a go, let us know how it works.

    Cheers

    Hi @aweos,

    Hopefully, you were able to clear up this issue. Since it’s been a while since we last heard from you, I’m going to mark this thread resolved.

    If you still have trouble, please feel free to open up a new topic. We’d be happy to jump back in and help you out.

    Take care

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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