PayPal abort from user, but donation is still in state pending

Hey @mazze5,

Happy to clarify here.

What may happen sometimes is that, due to caching, GiveWP can redirect the user to the failed donation page BUT we still didn’t receive the confirmation that the donation was canceled, so GiveWP leaves the donation as pending.

For a bit of context, this is the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.
2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”
3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction, as well as ongoing subscription renewals.
4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.
5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to complete.

If the webhook/IPN is unable to reach your site for any reason, the donation will remain “Pending” and eventually change to “Abandoned”.

So, if you have a pending donation that was canceled by the donor, after some time it will become abandoned automatically.

Please let us know if you have further questions on this or need any additional assistance!

Ok, thx for your answer.

you wrote

What may happen sometimes is that, due to caching, GiveWP can redirect the user to the failed donation page BUT we still didn’t receive the confirmation that the donation was canceled, so GiveWP leaves the donation as pending.

You say due to caching, what does that mean? And how can I fix it? I have disabled all caches I have found, even all other plugins are disabled. But sill the same behaviour, donations are in state “pending”, though the donor has cancelled the paypal checkout.

Hey @mazze5,

It means that if your page is cached, GiveWP does not receive the message from the webhook/IPN to know if the donation went through to not. The way to fix that is by disabling cache plugins and making sure that your server is not caching anything from GiveWP. Depending on the hosting company, you need to contact them to make sure that GiveWP is not cached.

If you still face this issue, then we’ll need clear and detailed steps on how to replicate it in a test environment.

Please let us know if you have further questions on this or need any additional assistance!

Hey @matheusfd,

thanks for your reply. As I said from my side I have disabled all caching plugins. I looked in the access log to see what happens when the cancel paypal link is clicked.

[08/Jan/2021:13:02:50 +0100] "GET /spenden/?giveDonationAction=failedDonation HTTP/2" 200 16000 "https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/"
[08/Jan/2021:13:02:50 +0100] "GET /give/donation-form?giveDonationFormInIframe=1&showFailedDonationError=1 HTTP/2" 200 9062 
[08/Jan/2021:13:02:51 +0100] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/2" 200 99

The POST ajax-request is with “action=give_donation_form_reset_all_nonce&give_form_id=13533”.
Is there a request missing? As donor I am back in the iframe form within the last step where you can choose the gateway and a message is displayed “We’re sorry, your donation failed to process. Please try again or contact site support.”

I am using paypal standard gateway with IPN. Completed payments with paypal works fine, IPN is triggered and the state changes from pending to complete, only if the donor aborts in paypal checkout I have the problem with the “pending” donations. Maybe you can help with these additional informations.

regards

Hey @mazze5,

I was able to replicate this edge-case issue and I’ve already passed it to the development team, so they can investigate and fix it in a future release. You can follow up on the progress of the fix here https://feedback.givewp.com/bug-reports/p/paypal-standard-should-change-donation-status-to-abandoned-if-the-user-cancels-t.

I’ll mark this ticket as resolved because all the next updates will be done through the feedback site. Feel free to add your two cents there if you’d like to ??

Have a great day!