PayPal says WooCommerce is the problem with pending payments…

Hi,

Well, you have to be a PAYING CUSTOMER to get support for thier FREE PRODUCT. That’s [ profanity redacted ]

You don’t have access to paid customer support no (that wouldn’t be sustainable!). But this forum is open and both staff and community both chip in, myself included. So please be patient and leave the profanity at the door.

Paypal keeps giving me the run around, countless calls to support and hours wasted, blaming my customers lack of computer skills, which is not the case.

Have customers actually contacted you and said there is a problem? If so what? The reason I ask is that those ‘pending payment’ orders could be quite innocent.

Unlike direct gateways, PayPal Standard redirects the user offsite to PayPal in order to make payment. To ensure a record of that order exists, WooCommerce creates a “pending payment” order in the system.

If the user pays, this order is updated (via PayPal IPN) and marked processing.

If the user doesn’t pay, doesn’t have a PayPal account and cannot use Credit Card (some countries are restricted), doesn’t want to continue, or just closes the browser window, that order still exists, but will remain pending until cleanup. This is normal.

If you have pending orders, but actually did get payment, thats a separate IPN issue, but given your comments this doesn’t sound like the case.

Hope that makes sense.

Many customers have been complaining and contacted me about a problem since October, but most have complained since December, when the number of pending that shows up in my woocommerce are up to 50%.

The problem, they say it’s Paypal, it errors, they all have a little different story, and I have experienced it first hand. I tried and it just wouldn’t go through. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But it was one or the other, I wasn’t able to get a pending in woocommerce, by myself.

The only thing in woocommerce I have for paypal, is my paypal email address, none of the other things such as API or the Paypal Identity Token.

A customer attempted several times yesterday and it didn’t even give a pending, they tried today and got one pending payment. (Pending never shows up in Paypal, only the woocommerce). So I have to log in and look for pending orders every day, then contact the customers, explain there’s a problem, and ask to send a PayPal Invoice, which seems to work fine funcionality wise, but it’s bad for business doing it this way.

When I talked with PayPal, they give me a different reason every time for the pending. I talk to the “Product and Site Support” (oh no, you can’t ask for “Tech support”).

Top Answers from PayPal:

1. Maybe the customer changed thier mind (they are ALL repeat customers, I have only repeat customers, they attempt several times because they WANT product, I even ask and they say how can I get product? So they aren’t changing thier mind.)

2. Maybe the customer just doesn’t understand what they are doing

3. Maybe the customer didn’t have sufficient funds or it was an invalid card.

4. Maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s a joke and an insult to be told this, it is NOT the case, the customers are very important people and know what they are doing. Based on everything they have all told me.

All (100%) of my customers are repeat customers, they know how to order product. They all have been customers more than 5 years, ordering regularly. It’s not a question about the customer.

When I started seeing a problem in October and lots of problems around Christmas, I knew something was wrong and PayPal kept telling me my customers are the problem.

I said PayPal was the problem, but today some lighbult tech got shut down when she accused my host of being the problem, so about 10 minutes after I mentioned woocommerce and asking if she knew of it, she then changed from the Host being the problem, to woocommerce being the problem.

I do not know, there are several posts here about pending problems, but after my many experiences with PayPal, I can’t believe a word they tell me anymore.

All my pending orders in woocommerce, show no information inside paypal. The only way I find out, is by logging into the website every day and checking for pending orders.

Mike, thank you for writing back so quicklky, you are the first person to make ANY sense of this since it started in OCTOBER, and we still don’t know where the problem is. But at least you aren’t sending me out the door with some lame excuse like PayPal.

p.s. sorry about the [language] earlier, looking forward to hearing back with ideas.

When you say “it wouldn’t go through” can you be more descriptive? Was there an error message? Was this on the PayPal website or your stores checkout page?

On the PayPal website.

There seems to be some type of error in the PayPal Page. Sorry it’s not more descriptive, the last time I tried it was in December during Christmas and I forget exactly what it said then.

In the mean time, I’ll try some test orders and see if I can get a pending or an error.

I’ve got a few customers on notice and they offered to copy the message next time it happens.

Ok, just tried it and the first one said.

“This invoice has already been paid. For more information, please contact the merchant.”

“Your purchase couldn’t be completed
There’s a problem with the merchant’s PayPal account. Please try again later.”

I remember I got this before, and I called paypal instantly and they said there is not any problem with my account.

If my memory is correct, I do believe there are other errors that show up, that this isn’t the only one. Gonna keep trying.

It sounds like customers are trying to pay for an order that’s already been paid for before. Make sure you don’t have a past invoice ID that is a duplicate of a new order. PayPal won’t accept any new orders that match a previous invoice ID even if it was 10 years ago. Try adding an invoice prefix or set it to something different. You can find the invoice prefix under advanced PayPal options in WooCommerce.

Also try looking at IPN history on PayPal.

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNOperations/

I’ve searched this issue, usually related to multiple websites connected to one paypal address.

I have one website/ one paypal address.

There’s a new invoice created for each order, or at least there should be. Can’t view the “invoice,” but I can view the order and see the order number.

Nothing to see inside PayPal, (over the phone) they don’t see anything, how could I find IPN info there? I’m searching and can’t find a thing. would I have to have the debug logging ON in woocommerce?

I got a screenshot sent to some “back office” department at PayPal and waiting to hear back from them.

If you ever used PayPal before using WooCommerce then you have invoice id’s that you can’t use again. Every PayPal transaction that is successful must have an invoice id. If it doesn’t go through then an invoice id isn’t issued. Did you have a different website before WooCommerce? Usually invoice numbers change to a low number when switching to another website. I had this same issue and I never had multiple websites.

If you did have a website before WooCommerce what range were the order numbers at?

Try doing this on PayPal.com:
Goto History > Advanced Search
Then type in the order number which failed to go through under invoice ID and then make sure to change the start date to when you first started using PayPal.
See if any transaction matching the order number comes up.

Thanks for the reply Kimsf! Some good info!

I did have a different website before woocommerce, but it used Google checkout. Since google was closing business, I made a new site with wordpress/woocommerce/paypal.

I searched with Order numbers and nothing shows up.

I’ll keep searching, maybe I’ll get lucky, but I doubt it.

Also another thing is that if the e-mail doesn’t match the billing zip code on WooCommerce then that could cause PP to not let it go through. Try running in sandbox mode and see what happens depending on what you do. For example if you have a checkout button on the cart.php page click that. Then try the checkout button on the checkout.php page. Change billing info etc…

If hypothetically you had both a PayPal button on checkout and cart and only the checkout button worked then you’d see some failures but also some go through.

Well should the zip code even be relevant at this point during the time the customer is on the product website?

The reason I mention is because anyone with a credit card can enter and have paypal charge it, even if they don’t have a paypal account. So if you haven’t given PayPal a credit card, they can’t confirm billing zip codes yet.

I’m even trying my test example as a new customer…

As pointed out earlier, PayPal requires unique invoice IDs, so if you have multiple stores with same order IDs they can overlap. No idea why PayPal staff could not pick up on this.

2 workarounds.

1. Within the PayPal account there is actually a setting to disable this check.

https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/admin/setup-account/

2. In woocommerce PayPal settings you can change the ‘prefix’ setting to something more unique. E.g ‘mystore2-‘

“Your purchase couldn’t be completed
There’s a problem with the merchant’s PayPal account. Please try again later.”

This one is more obscure. I’ve only seen it happen when the address (your pp address) is wrong in settings, or sandbox is mistakenly checked.

I understand the unique invoice ID’s, but surely it’s not the case here because this woocommerce store was created with this paypal address. They were both brand new when they were linked together. There are no other stores or other paypal addresses connected or associated in the past or present, it’s a unique 1 to 1 relationship.

Anytime I’ve scene one of these errors, it was together with the other.

Here’s a screenshot:

https://oi66.tinypic.com/6qd089.jpg

They were working smoothly, flawlessly, for 2 years, until October 2015 I started seeing problems with the customers.

By December, the problem grew to a much larger frequency rate, 50% of the orders I can see are pending.

Customers have to try, 2, 3, 4 times just to get it through, and even then it ends up in a pending status 50% of the time.

So of order attempts vs. successful orders, the successful order rate has got to be below 20%.

All the Customers are repeat customers, and they are getting more & more unhappy.

It’s a recipe for website disaster if this is not solved.