|
KarenC
|
March 8, 2017 at 12:46 am
Hi, we have got a situation where the registration status is payment pending even though the Paypal payment has been confirmed received. The transaction status is incomplete. May I know what could possibly cause this? Thanks.
|
|
Tony
|
March 8, 2017 at 4:09 am
Hi Karen,
Within the transaction does it show a PayPal payment? If so wha status is the payment? (the color of the status bar will tell you, if you hover over it you should see a legend – http://take.ms/nxDGO)
Which PayPal payment method are you using?
|
|
KarenC
|
March 8, 2017 at 4:23 am
Hi Tony, the bar is blue (pending). Paypal method is Paypal Standard.
|
|
Tony
|
March 8, 2017 at 4:30 am
If the payment is blue with PayPal standard and the user has paid then it usually means the IPN from PayPal failed to either arrive at your site or failed validate correctly.
Have other payments gone through before/after the above?
There are multiple reasons this can happen which we can work through, the first steps to work through would be to confirm your account and IPN’s are setup correctly:
https://eventespresso.com/wiki/how-to-set-up-paypal-ipn/
You can also check the servers error logs to see if any errors were through by Event Espresso around the time of the registration (if the IPN causes an error it should be within the error logs).
However to avoid problems with PayPal payments we recommend switching over to use the PayPal Express payment method, it uses the same PayPal account you have now but works differently than standard and doesn’t use IPN’s making it more reliable.
|
|
KarenC
|
March 8, 2017 at 4:44 am
Hi Tony, I’m quite sure the IPN settings haven’t changed. Also another registration got successfully paid and approved a few hours after this one.
But anyway, I’m trying to confirm the IPN settings but my Paypal interface is quite different and I can’t get to the IPN settings. Where do I check the server logs?
What is the difference between Paypal standard and express?
|
|
KarenC
|
March 8, 2017 at 4:49 am
Hi again, I’ve managed to see the IPN history and there are 3 there for today which all have status ‘Sent’. It seems that the first and the last, didn’t get back to the website but the middle one was ok.
I guess this means that I need to check the error log. Please let me know where to go for that. Thanks.
|
|
Tony
|
March 8, 2017 at 5:25 am
If IPN’s are currently working for other payments then its likely your IPN settings are correct.
Where do I check the server logs?
Its different depending on your host, usually they’ll have a section without your control panel to view them, or they are within an error.log file on the server.
What is the difference between Paypal standard and express?
In a nutshell, the only difference is how they communicate.
PayPal Standard uses IPN’s (PayPal send a request to your site to inform the site payment has been made), PayPal Express does not (your site pings PayPal to confirm the payment when the user arrives back at your site).
The features available within Standard ad available within Express.
|
|
KarenC
|
March 8, 2017 at 3:11 pm
Thanks, Tony.
I’ve found a file called error_log in the root directory and had a look into it. The last line was in February this year so it appears there wasn’t anything on our server. So it looks like it could be due to some other reason. Anyway, we won’t dwell too much on that.
It sounds like it’s best we change to Paypal Express from your advice. I’m just not sure why we didn’t use that in the first place.
Ok, so is there anything we’ll need to do in the changeover on the live site? I don’t want people in the middle of a payment when we are changing the settings. Do you have a best practice for this process?
Also, what should I do with the transactions that are marked pending? How do I manually apply them? They don’t have the transaction ID yet.
Thanks so much for your assistance and advice.
|
|
Josh
|
March 8, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Ok, so is there anything we’ll need to do in the changeover on the live site? I don’t want people in the middle of a payment when we are changing the settings. Do you have a best practice for this process?
You can have both PayPal Express and PayPal Standard activated at the same time, and before you deactivate PayPal Standard, you can go to Event Espresso > Transactions then click on Failed Transactions. This will show a list of Failed transactions (where they didn’t or haven’t completed the registration form). If they didn’t compete the registration form, it will say Failed. If they are still filling out the registration form, it will say TXN in Progress. So if you see a Transaction row that says TXN in progress, it will be best to wait for that transaction to finalize before you make the switch.
Also, what should I do with the transactions that are marked pending? How do I manually apply them? They don’t have the transaction ID yet.
You go to the Event Espresso > Transactions page, then click on the Incomplete Transaction, then you click on the Apply Payment button and it will give you some fields to input payment information.
|
|
KarenC
|
March 9, 2017 at 4:16 am
Thanks Josh. I’ve managed to switch over to Paypal Express in the way that you’ve advised. Hopefully the payments will go thru better now. Do I need to remove the IPN URL that was setup in Paypal for standard?
I’ve also managed to manually changed the status of the payments to approved and copied the unique transaction id from Paypal and pasted into the payment details. So those records are now fixed too.
Thanks for your assistance.
|
|
Tony
|
March 9, 2017 at 4:28 am
Do I need to remove the IPN URL that was setup in Paypal for standard?
Personally I’d leave that as is, it won’t cause any problems with PayPal Express and if you use another product that with that PayPal account which uses PayPal Standard you’d need to enable it again.
When you use PayPal standard you pass over a ‘notify_url’ value to PayPal with the payment information, that overrides the value set in the IPN URL field on your account. This means as long as your account has IPN’s enabled, anything that uses PayPal Standard should continue to work on that account.
PayPal requires ‘something’ is within that field for IPN’s to work, so if you remove what you currently have set you disable IPN’s.
|
|
KarenC
|
March 9, 2017 at 4:35 am
Ok thanks, Tony. That’s good to know that I can leave the settings.
|
|
Tony
|
March 9, 2017 at 4:47 am
You’re most welcome, Karen.
You should find PayPal Express to more reliable than Standard however if you do run into any problems please do let us know.
|
