Orders always in pending status

Well, let’s think about this one piece at a time.

1) WooCommerce has its own standard system for updating the order status based on how the checkout goes. The default is to set to Processing (which I assume is what you’re referring to as In Progress..??) and that would trigger order emails, etc. Then you could either manually update to Completed, or you could use IPN to do so, which is what the built in PayPal Standard does.

2) Our plugin uses Express Checkout instead of PayPal Standard, of course, and it just allows WooCommerce to use its default flow, which is to set new orders to Processing. Rather than build a simple IPN solution to handle just one task directly into our plugin, though, we built a separate plugin: PayPal IPN for WordPress. This turns your WP site into a PayPal IPN listener and gives you hooks so you can do anything you want with IPN, not just update the WooCommerce order status. We did put together a guide for using that plugin to update the Woo order status, though: https://www.angelleye.com/automatically-update-woocommerce-order-status-when-paypal-payment-completes/

So with your scenario, I’m a bit confused. Are you telling me that it has always updated to Completed on its own even without IPN in place? Or you saying it used to always go to Processing but now it’s going to Pending instead…even though the payments are indeed working..??

We did have some bugs in our 1.4.x updates recently, but you’re saying this started in mid-March, so that wouldn’t be the issue here because we just released those recently.

It’s tough to say exactly what could be going on here, but if you can clarify anything for me based on the above comments I’ll try to help more. Thanks!

Thanks for your answer.
1) Yes, “In progress” means “Processing”, sorry for confusing.
2) I already use your plugin PayPal for IPN and I’d use it for changing order status only…

My scenario is really simple: customers buy a product, IPN says “Completed” so I assume IPN flow is correct, PayPal notifies that money was sent by customer, but Woocommerce leaves the order in “Pending” forever, unless I go and manually change the status to “Processing”. If I leave a timeout to 60 minutes, ie., then the order is cancelled and I never receive order emails from my site.

I did a mistake when I talked about March: I mean I used PayPal standard and since March it has stopped to work; then I switch to your plugin but the result is exactly the same. Sorry for misunderstanding.
I hope you can help, I really don’t know where searching more.
Many thanks.

Well, my answer is still the same. If you want orders to automatically update to Completed you’ll need to do that with IPN. Since you’re already using our IPN plugin this should be very quick and easy for you to setup.

Or are you saying you already put our tutorial method in place but it’s not working..??

I don’t want automatically update to “Completed”, that’s something that has to be set manually once the item is shipped. I just need that the order is set to “Processing”, as it was before, which alerts us that a payment has been made and we can provide for delivering.
Anyway, to clarify, I did your IPN tricky, just to see if the status would change automatically from “Pending” to something else. And it didn’t work. Still “Pending”.
IPN tracking orders say “Completed” in both cases, but it seems it doesn’t communicate it to WooCommerce.
Thanks!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by cedat.

Okay, well again, the default in WooCommerce is to set to Processing. If you’re getting Pending then something else must be getting in the way to cause that. Do you have any other plugins in place that could be doing something with order status at all?

No. And I didn’t install any new plugin before it stopped to work.
I want to double check again my PayPal account but I already did it many times…

I found what’s wrong. The fault comes from a plugin that I updated 2 months ago; it worked nice till the update. Now I must contact authors and open a support ticket.
Many thanks for your great help!

Glad you found the culprit!

Hi @cedat, I’m having something simular so I was curious which plugin was it that caused it? Thanks in advance!

Will

Hi Will, the plugin is “Ebook store”. The author told me that a new release is coming to fix it.

Cheers.

My client is experiencing difficulty like Cedat who initially wrote in that orders remain in pending status and that order notifications from Woo Commerce do not arrive regarding details about a customer’s order, yet PayPal notifications do arrive.

My client never experienced problems like this until around April when Woo 3.0 came out. Since then, I have reached out and received incredible and continued support from Woo Commerce (they requested site access and found no plugin issues), PayPal, and GoDaddy, but I never quite resolved the issue.

Most recently, a PayPal technical engineer took a look to have me switch out from PayPal Standard to Express Checkout, download your plugin and another plugin, “WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Gateway” for which I did. In addition, he covered Checkout Endpoints which centered on the redirect url. I followed the instructions as laid out and unfortunately, I am not able to get the Order Notification to send out promptly to customers like the PayPal notifications do.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

@chulavistamarketing, I’m responding to the direct email you sent me. Best to work there since this issue is closed.

I’m using the latest version, and I have IPN set up, but it doesn’t update and remains at Pending even after payment.

@aethon, have you followed the instructions here to trigger the Woo order status updates?

Hi @angelleye, can I add that php script to a must-use plugin instead so I don’t have to re-add it with each theme update?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Aethon.