Posted: July 7, 2015 at 1:29 pm
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I found the following two prior support forum threads which also touch on what I believe to be a major user-experience hurdle for event administrators. At best, it is a point of confusion. At worst–as was my experience–it set of a chain of events that very nearly saw my team pull the plug on Event Espresso altogether. 16 failed transactions and a problem report (Mar 30/15) Split: Many failed transactions (Mar 10/15) Yesterday, the host of an event which closes soon to registrations contacted me to request a CSV dump of its reg/txn data. I generated that report from Event Espresso, but noticed that there was a stretch of time last month during which no registrations were made. Convinced of a glitch, I looked more closely at the Incomplete Registrations tab–quite literally more “failed” transactions than successful transactions! Oh crap!!! I clicked through one of these failed transactions to get more information. Registration Step Progress
(Substitute my earlier “Oh crap!!!” with something much more colorful!) Being a PHP/MySQL developer by trade, I immediately cracked open the database for a look. Maybe the attendee and payment records simply got disconnected… Maybe I can reconstruct the lost registrations… Or so at the time I was convinced they were lost. I immediately went to my manager’s office and declared that we need pull the plug on our Event Espresso installation–do not pass go, do not collect $200. (Still under the impression that EE was losing registrations somehow.) I prepared to break the bad news to the event host that the software had lost numerous registrations. I asked that she forward her copies of the successful registration emails to me so I could reconcile her records with the Event Espresso database. (Still, I was fearing the worst that she would have many more email receipts than I had matching registration records.) Ultimately, her email records matched one-for-one the successful/complete registrations in the Event Espresso database. …What the heck is going on here, I asked myself?! Then I dug a little deeper into the EE support forums and found the two aforementioned threads. Do I understand this correctly? If a web visitor chooses a ticket, clicks “Register Now”, advances to the attendee information page and then closes his/her browser (or navigates away from the page), a partial registration record is created with initial transaction status set to failed. Correct? Why then, does the administrative interface mislead me by saying “Payment Options: Completed” and “Finalize Registration: Completed” when neither of those statements is true of an abandoned purchase? Refer to this screenshot of a transaction with misleading progress highlighted (img via Google Drive) For interest sake, this is the And its corresponding The difference between two words “Abandoned” (which is used with clarity elsewhere in the system) and “Failed” (which suggests a problem), is also the difference between a logical explanation and a frantic effort to minimize a revenue-losing situation. PLEASE better clarify terminology and progress messages in future EE versions. //end rant |
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Hi Vincent, a failed transaction is one that is started but the attendee does not enter any details at the beginning of registration checkout. An abandoned transaction occurs when they do enter their information but change their mind and do not pay and complete the registration. What version of Event Espresso 4 are you currently using for your project? — |
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*nod* Now that I know what circumstances trigger “Failed” vs “Abandoned”, I’m relieved that what appeared to be a slew of lost registrations was, in fact, a non-issue. IMHO, EE would benefit from improved consistency with its status labels. Why is ticket selection, with neither attendee info nor payment a failure? Yet ticket selection, with attendee info, but no payment is abandonment? Shouldn’t they both be flagged as abandoned? The cause in both cases is the same–customer leaves the page without completing the transaction, thus literally “abandoning” his/her cart. Perhaps even more important than the Abandoned vs Failed status labels, however; is the misleading block of text found in Transaction Session Details >> Registration Step Process. Instead of:
Would the following not greatly improve clarity?
Just my 2 cents. ~~ Per your question, my organization is running 4.6.23p at the moment. Bringing that up to the latest 4.7.x release is on my to-do list for later this summer, however. |
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Hi Vincent, the difference between those labels is that there is some contact information available when the registration is abandoned. When its marked as failed, then there should be no information available. Please let us know if the issue continues on the latest release and we do recommend staying up to date: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/ee4-changelog/ — |
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Hi Vincent, Thank you for taking the time to leave this feedback, we do appreciate any and all feedback as it helps us improve. Its important to differentiate between registrations and transactions. I’ll refer to the status of both as REGISTRATION/TRANSACTION.
Once you click the register button, we create a Registration. As at that point it has no details at all for the contact(s) it has a status of ‘Incomplete’. ALL registrations should have a Transaction assigned to them so we create one for the registration(s) at the same time, again as that has no details it has a status of ‘Failed’. So right now we have Incomplete/Failed (Incomplete Registration/Failed Transaction) As Lorenzo mentioned the difference between a transactions with a status of Failed and a Transaction with a status of Abandoned is basically the attendee info is present.
Previously we didn’t have a valid registration (it was Incomplete) we now do. So at this point the we have Pending Payment/Abandoned (remember registration/transaction status) Because at this point, if the attendee does close the browser they have applied registration details, but abandoned the payment. Also note that a Transaction may have many payments, not just a single one, so this is not directly related to a single payment which is why payments are grouped within a transaction each payment can have its own status which will contribute to the transaction status. As the attendee continues through the status for both are updated depending on various settings and choices made by the user.
They could be, but it doesn’t allow for easy filtering for future features we’d like to included (if any) I agree it would make things easier but we are allowing for the most flexibility from the beginning to save having to change this further down the line. (which could easily introduce bugs due to how many features are tied to status changes)
As you can see from the above they do actually have different meanings, but I do follow what your saying.
The Registration Step Process bug was fixed in version 4.7.2, see here:
The same steps taken on 2 registrations: Before the fix – http://take.ms/sNvBH After – http://take.ms/ujM9g Once you update to the latest version of Event Espresso those details should display correctly. |
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