Support

November 13, 2014 at 9:21 am

Hi Angus, are you saying that it is sending the registrant/attendee from PayPal.com back to PayPal.com instead of your site?

Is Bypass Payment Overview Page set to no in your PayPal settings within your WordPress dashboard?

http://cl.ly/image/0Z3X0k3h251W

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Lorenzo

November 13, 2014 at 10:59 am

Hi Angus,

I suspect there’s 2 reasons for this, combined together they cause the loop you are currently seeing.

When ‘Bypass Payment Overview Page’ is set to yes a registration that has a status of Incomplete is automatically pushed to PayPal to make a payment.

Sometimes (due to PayPal’s servers or heavy network traffic) the IPN from PayPal is delayed and takes a little longer than usual to reach your site. The IPN is what updates the users registration status to show they have paid. So when this happens usually your users a re-directed back to your site and see a status of ‘Incomplete’ on the thank you page. If they refresh the page a short time after this the status updates (IPN has now reached your site)

So if ‘Bypass Payment Overview Page’ is set to Yes, the user is re-directed back to your site (IPN still not received) the thank you page reads the regisration as incomplete and re-redirects the user back to PayPal.

I’m guessing you also have the option ‘Show payment options for “Pending Payments” on the Payment Overview page?’ set to Yes?

To test if this is the case you can disable the ‘Bypass Payment Overview Page’ option and see if users are directed back to the Thank you page with an Incomplete status, only to refresh and find it updates to Complete. As this is an intermittent issue this will likely not happen on all payments so will be hard to identify.

The downside to that setting is your users will need to select PayPal as their payment method.

You could also try install the Simplfied Transactions template available here:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/how-to-set-up-paypal-ipn/#incomplete

Which will allows your site to process the IPN’s as quickly as possible once received (is basically removes all styling form the IPN listening page – ‘Transactions’)

November 14, 2014 at 5:24 am

Could this slow-down be driven by our server as well?

Yes its possible.

In a nutshell there is roughly 10 seconds from when the user pays for the IPN to processed before the user is directed back to your site from PayPal. (If the user does not click to force the redirect) In reality it is actually less time than this as many users click the link to redirect back to your site, so its needs to be as quick as possible. PayPal are generally quick enough sending the IPN’s, sometimes not.

So if your Transactions page takes say 5 seconds to load, add another 5 seconds to before the status is updated (could be more its just an example). So it could be 15 seconds before the users status is updated, by which time they are already back at your site and have loaded the thank you page showing ‘Incomplete’ and so the loop starts.

So what you want is to do all you can to process the IPN as soon as it is received. That’s what the simplified transactions template tries to help with, it removes all styling from the transactions page and just loads the content, to help improve the speed. If the server is also slow, it again adds time.

To note the simplified transactions template, is not a plugin, its is a standard WP page template you should add to your theme, then select that template on the ‘Transactions’ page. Instructions are within the download.

November 15, 2014 at 10:01 am

Hi,

Are you comfortable using an SFTP or FTP client? If so, take a look at these steps for getting the simplified transactions theme template running.

https://gist.github.com/lorenzocaum/648f677d0a228fa26f55

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Lorenzo

November 16, 2014 at 9:21 pm

Hi,

Your web host should be able to provide you with the credentials to login via SFTP or FTP. Then you can setup the new template:

https://gist.github.com/lorenzocaum/648f677d0a228fa26f55

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Lorenzo