Support

March 24, 2021 at 3:19 pm

Hi there,

We had Pending Payments set as the default registrations for our event by accident

When you say by accident, are you sure thats not the correct setting? The majority of users will want to have a Default Registration Status (DRS for short) of ‘Pending Payment’.

Setting that option to ‘Approved’ basically tells Event Espresso you don’t care about the payment status and that EVERY registration should be marked as Approved and apply to your ‘sold’ values.

A DRS of pending payment simply means that a registration will only apply to the sold values when payment is made in full, at which point the registration will automatically switch to have a status of Approved. Approved registrations apply to your sold values.

and thus had 81 registrations with a lock on them that we said to Approve and Send Notice, and they are green now.

I think you are confused by the Registrations Statuses used here.

You’ve now set the ‘registration status’ to Approved on those 81 registrations, which means they now apply to your sold values. That actually has almost nothing to do with the payment itself, which leads to this:

By approving these, will Paypal process the payment now?

No, because the registration status won’t prevent payments from processing.

It says “Transaction Status: Incomplete”.

That means the amount paid (I’m guessing there no payment in EE for these so this value is 0) is less than the total amount owed. Event Espresso has not received any notification of PayPal from PayPal for these registrations, it’s not waiting on that based on the registrations status as thats not how it works, I’ll add some details in a second.

We see an Apply Payment button, do we need to click on that for every person or just wait a bit?

No, thats used for you (the Admin) to be able to add your own payments into the EE Transaction, say they paid via Bank Transfer, you can apply a payment to include it within EE. Or they handed you cash, you need a record of the payment within EE, right? Thats what the apply payment button is for.

‘Online’ payment mehtods within EE should automatically process the payments made in the background, you don’t need to click anything.

Have you confirmed that payments have actually gone through to your PayPal account for these 81 registrations? If so there’s an issue with the connection to/from PayPal and your site which we can troubleshoot further.

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To explain a little how registrations work, registrations start out with a status of ‘Incomplete’.

When users add their details on the ‘Attendee Information’ step, the Registration status will change to be ‘Pending Payment’. Now EE shows them payment options on the checkout.

If the user chooses to use an online payment method (like PayPal) and pays through that, EE will receive a notification of payment. In the background, EE will process the request, check the payment amount and apply it to the transaction. If the payment amount is equal to the total amount owed, the transaction status will change to complete. When that happens, any registrations assigned to that transaction automatically switch to have a status of ‘Approved’.

As mentioned above, ‘Approved’ registrations apply to the sold values so that the status you want them to end up with.

If they chose an ‘offline’ payment method, like Invoice or Bank, then EE will apply the DRS you set on the event to the registration and nothing else. Now its up to you to take the payment from them however you prefer doing so and you apply the payment in EE to keep a record of it.

March 24, 2021 at 5:07 pm

But we have no registrations, and then we saw them all in the system with a lock and Pending after we had gotten a call from someone trying to register that it was giving errors.

By the lock icon, do you mean the one shown below the checkbox on the registration list? If so, if you hover over that lock a popup will show some details on why it is locked. In short it is locked to show you can’t delete it because there is a payment object assigned to it, but that doesn’t mean the payment has gone through etc.

I thought that the pending setting was set in error and thus the issue, and I then clicked on all locked registrations and made them Approved, and thus making the payments going through.

Doing that does not make the payment go through, nothing you do within Event Espresso itself ‘makes a payment go through, its not how payments work in EE. The user purchasing a ticket should make the payment go through to EE, you should not need to do anything to ‘confirm’ payments or make them process.

What you’ve done above is change the registration status to ‘Approved’ so all of those registrations apply to your sold values, it doesn’t do anything with the payments.

We use Paypal Standard, perhaps its not working at all and that is the issue and not our setup?

It does sound like there is an issue with PayPal and your site rather than the ‘pending payment’ status confusion.

The first issue I would address is PayPal Standard, we’ve actually deprecated PayPal Standard due to how unreliable it can be (It still shows for users that have used it previously, but new users of EE don’t see it at all).

Before moving forward, have you logged into your PayPal account to confirm if the payments for the above registrations show there?

I just bought my own ticket, Paypal said it went through in PayPal site, though when I come back it says incomplete.

This highlights that there is an issue with your site/PayPal communicating with each other and is likely why your in the current situation. However, rather than troubleshooting PayPal Standard to find the problem, you are much better switching over to PayPal Express (same PayPal account just different credentials).

Go to Event Espresso -> Payment Methods -> PayPal Espress

Activate the payment method.

Then on your PayPal account you’ll need some credentials, follow the steps here to find them:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/paypal-express-payment-gateway/#locate

Add those details, register onto an event again and test a payment using PayPal Express. Does it correctly show the transactions as Complete and your Registration Status as Approved without you needing up manually update it?