PayPal Taking Some Donations and Not Others

Hi @wtnhistwebmaster,
Glad you reached out, these are great questions.

When a donation doesn’t move to “complete”, it means something isn’t quite right.

The donation that is “pending” will likely move to “abandoned” soon. If it had arrived in your PayPal account, I would suspect the webhook/IPN wasn’t communicating properly, but because it didn’t arrive at all, I know we need to have a look at your error logs.

We’ll do the same thing for the failed donation, the logs will have a record of why that donation failed.

Let’s take a look at your error logs. You can do this by navigating to Dashboard > Donations > Tools > Logs. Here is a screencast you might find helpful: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c3eD0AVFgVG.

From there, you’ll see a list of things that have been happening on your site. Look for errors that are PayPal-related and correlate to those 2 specific donations. When you see one, click the eyeball icon next to it to open up a detailed view. Copy/paste those error codes, and send them along to me. They should have some helpful context as to why those donations didn’t complete.

Let me know if you have questions in the meantime, I’m happy to help.

We only have 2 logs currently:

{
“log_content”: “Payment log info”,
“log_parent”: 6854,
“log_type”: “sale”,
“log_date”: “2023-05-16 13:59:58”,
“log_date_gmt”: “2023-05-16 13:59:58”,
“form_id”: “6684”,
“price_id”: 0
}

{
“log_content”: “Payment log info”,
“log_parent”: 6833,
“log_type”: “sale”,
“log_date”: “2023-05-11 09:04:51”,
“log_date_gmt”: “2023-05-11 09:04:51”,
“form_id”: “6684”,
“price_id”: 0
}

Hi, @wtnhistwebmaster.

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”.

What happens with PayPal Standard is that if a donor gives up during the payment, PayPal does not communicate it to your website so we keep the donation pending until we are sure that PayPal is not updating your site about the donation status.

It means that if you see it as pending on your website and the donation does not exist in PayPal, it was not completed and will become abandoned.

?Please let us know if you have further questions or need additional assistance!

@matheusfd so what you are telling me is that with PayPal standard, the donor has to have a PayPal account? Because from my own research that I’ve done based on those failed donations above, that seems to be the case.

Hi, @wtnhistwebmaster.

Not really. When using PayPal Standard, your donors will have the ability to pay the donation using their PayPal account or credit card.

?Please let us know if you have further questions or need additional assistance!