Hi Stephen,
I’m preparing to launch my website and am testing event organiser pro in paypal sandbox mode. I seem to have an issue getting confirmation emails to send to paying bookees.
After booking a ticket and completing payment, paypal returns the user to the original event listing and displays the message “Thank you for your booking. You shall receive an e-mail containing your tickets shortly”.
I receive a confirmation email notifying me of the ticket purchase, however no email is sent to the user/bookee to confirm their booking. In bookings tickets are reserved as ‘pending‘.
If i set the ticket price to £0.00, everything functions correctly – the bookee will receive a confirmation email and the ticket will be ‘confirmed‘. It seems to be when I put a price to the tickets that confirmation emails no longer get sent to the bookee.
Any ideas how I might be able to get around this?
Thanks in advance,
Michael

Michael Close
Hi Michael,
What payment gateway are you using? PayPal?
If so if you go to the booking’s admin page, near the bottom do you see a link called ‘gateway response’ ? If so, clicking that will give you, in full the message received from PayPal. If bookings are still pending, then it’s probably because PayPal hasn’t confirmed the payment. Usually this is because the currency you are using on your site is not one listed as accepted on your Profile account.
If there is no gateway response, then PayPal’s IPN was not able to reach your website. This would require a bit more digging to find out the cause.
If you are using the offline gateway (which I don’t think you are based on the message you are seeing), then non-free bookings require manual approval.

Stephen Harris
Thanks for the quick response.
I’m using paypal in sandbox mode with currency matching in both event organiser and paypal. The gateway response shows [log_message] => Payment pending. (unilateral)
Paypal says this means the payment is pending because it was made to an email address that is not yet registered or confirmed, yet my paypal is verified – I’ve also tested woo commerce sandbox payments on the same site and they process fine so still can’t quite figure this one out.

Michael Close
Hi Stephen,
You wrote above “f so if you go to the booking’s admin page, near the bottom do you see a link called ‘gateway response’ ? If so, clicking that will give you, in full the message received from PayPal.”
I don’t see this link in my admin’s booking page. Is this feature still available?

Bond Nwonye
Just to clarify: this only appears if an IPN was received and validated. In your case, there is an issue in validating the IPN.
if a ‘gateway response’ appears it means Event Organiser and the payment gateway have successfully communicated. Therefore, under such circumstances, if a booking is still pending it is due to an issue with the payment, or that PayPal requires manual approval (e.g. to accept an alternative currency).

Stephen Harris