Confirmation issues
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Hi Stephen,
We are having some issues regarding the payment notifications on the plugin.
Some payments have been going through fine, but others show in Paypal as completed but pending in the admin.
I have discovered that the Paypal account is used by another site and there is url set in ”Instant Payment Notification Preferences’.
Will this cause problems with the plugin?Today has less confirmations for some reason.
How is the best way to debug this?
Do you have a Paypal guide?
Alex Steer
Hi Alex,
There can be two reasons of this. 1) The plug-in has received and acknowledged a payment notification, however it was paid for with a different currency. In such cases the transaction ID will appear in the bookings page, and you can view the ‘gateway response’ on the bookings admin page.
2) More likely is that PayPal was unable to communicate with your site. If this were happening consistently then it would probably be because your site is inaccessible (e.g. behind a firewall, or sometimes ‘coming soon’ plug-ins can block IPNs). In this case, it’s possible that the site was either down, that the site took too long to respond or even that PayPal itself took too long to respond when the plug-in attempts to verify the transaction notification.
The best way of debugging this it to look at the IPN history in your PayPal account. With their new UI you won’t find it (if you do, please let me know…) but you can access it directly via this url: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-ipn-notify (assuming you’re logged in). Then click view payment history.
If you inspect a failed IPN then anything other than a 200 code would indicate one of the first two problems. A 200 for booking which did not confirm would suggest it was unable to verify the authenticity of the notification.
Going ahead you can get the plug-in to log (to your apache error logs) by enabling
WP_DEBUG. This will log when an IPN is received, and the outcome of that IPN.Stephen Harris
OK,
The IPN log suggests no failed notifications.
We do have international transactions so currency could be an issue on some of these, our settings are: Allow payments sent to me in a currency I do not hold: ‘Yes, accept and convert them to British Pounds’
How is the best way to manage currency transactions going forward? If a user paid in foreign currency would the order be confirmed slower because of the exchange?
The plug-in has received and acknowledged a payment notification, however it was paid for with a different currency.
Re. the quote, could this be more clear in the admin rather than just an Id but no confirmation?
If admins were quick to initiate manual confirmation would this still log a transaction id?
I appreaciate that this is not an instantanious process because there are various issues that can slow things down before a user successfully clears payment.
Please let me know what you think.
Nearly forgot: My Account > Profile (under ‘Selling preferences’ – Instant Payment Notification preferences)
If admins were quick to initiate manual confirmation would this still log a transaction id?
Yes, it should (though this has never been tested).
How is the best way to manage currency transactions going forward? If a user paid in foreign currency would the order be confirmed slower because of the exchange?
This isn’t immediately clear. PayPal’s documentation suggest that the transaction isn’t complete, because it requires manual approval of the currency. And indeed the status received by PayPal’s IPN is ‘pending’.
I think some sort of “flag”, a visual cue, should be introduced to highlight bookings which ‘require action’ (or indeed a status to that effect).
I don’t think it does – I have confirms with no transation id’s logged whilst visible on the IPN log, it would be better if this logged.
This isn’t immediately clear. PayPal’s documentation suggest that the
transaction isn’t complete, because it requires manual approval of the
currency. And indeed the status received by PayPal’s IPN is ‘pending’.Paypal is set to to accept these automatically in the IPN settings – not sure where in Paypal to manually accept.
A visual cue would help to ease the worries of admins and prompt investigation.
I will keep an eye on it and study it further.
I have confirms with no transation id’s logged whilst visible on the IPN log
This suggests that currency is not an issue.
If you enable
WP_DEBUGthen receipt of an IPN and the outcome of that IPN is logged in the apache logs, that may help determine the cause of the failures.Stephen,
I ran two tests today, one was a CC payment and the other was account both through Paypal.
The first one displayed in admin – Paypal shows completed – IPN code 200 and sent – No confirmation
The second one displayed in admin – Paypal shows completed – IPN code 200 and sent with debug on – true – No confirmation
Nothing in my apache log since the 30th June.
I have contacted the hosting provider to see if a Firewall is blocking.
This has only happened since wednesday evening.
What else could do this?
Alex, we’ve been communicating via e-mail, but I wanted to post a link to the announcement of an update (v1.10.4) with regards to this issue here for anyone else who may be following this thread.
http://wp-event-organiser.com/blog/announcements/paypal-auto-confirmation/
Looks like it is working now, Great.
I had one go through and confirm this morning.